In Las Vegas during this month’s McAfee FOCUS 09 conference, I listened to various speakers in the Threats and Trends track. They explained how cybercrime was now managed by individuals driving their groups according to highly professional business models.

One of the most interesting talks was made by my colleague Dirk Kolberg, who presented on Innovative Marketing, a Ukrainian scareware company the Federal Trade Commission accused of spreading some massive “scareware” schemes–alarming messages falsely claimed that scans had detected viruses, spyware, and illegal pornography on consumers’ computers. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland approved the FTC’s request to call a halt to the company’s activities and freeze the assets of those behind the scams.

Explaining that Innovative has more than 600 employees in real offices, subsidiaries in various countries such as India, Poland, Canada, United States, and Argentina and complete with customer-calling centers, Dirk said the company received approximately 4.5 million order IDs in 11 months or, in other words, US$180 million dollars (at $40 each). Technical support, a professional website, and LinkedIn profiles for the company and its staff provided what appears to be a legitimate front. Following its legal troubles, it is now a defunct company; yet many employees have joined a new entity that has the same production targets.

The same day, my colleague Dmitri Alperovitch gave an overview of the Eastern European countries’ cybercrime landscape. Like Dirk, Dmitri demonstrated the high level of organization within the cybercrime industry. The first example came from Romania, where the Bogdan Païu carding gang operated. Members were caught in the act and arrested in 2006 after they emptied the accounts of several hundred citizens of Brazil, Spain, Italy, and the United States.

Well organized and equipped with sophisticated cloning devices, they received the personal data from Russian accomplices. Counterfeiters used the money diverted from ATMs on striptease entertainment clubs, luxury cars, luxury hotel accommodation, food, and fine drinks.

In the second part of his talk, Dmitri presented an events timeline of the Eastern European carding underground:

He discussed CarderPlanet, and its hierarchical structure set up like a mafia (and the source for the following image: NICSA-FBI-SSA, Michael J. McKeown )

CarderPlanet was shut down in 2004 and the FTC complaint for the injunction against IMU dates from December 2008, but cybercrime gangs will always rise from their ashes.

Around Kyiv, the making of fake antivirus software still flourishes. The latest statistics on rogue antivirus–presented by Craig Schmugar and Anthony Bettini in their session–are unequivocal.

The last piece of news on carding and phishing demonstrates the size and the worldwide organization of the actual cybercrime gangs.

• In France, about 70 individuals were recently indicted. They were “mules” who, via Western Union, sent the money they embezzled to the Ukraine and Russia.
• In France, a gang of Slovakian gangsters from Britain was under investigation after bank cards were used to take more than $480,000 from cash machines in northern France. Up to 50 Eastern Europeans descended on Calais from Dover early on September 11 before emptying cash points across the region. 34 were arrested, all using Barclays Bank cards. According to the police in Lille, a “Mafia-style” mastermind had used dozens of mules to empty machines at a range of banks.
• This month in the United States, the FBI announced the results of the Operation Phish Phry. After a two-year investigation, more than 50 individuals in California, Nevada, and North Carolina and nearly 50 Egyptian citizens have been charged with crimes including computer fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, money laundering, and aggravated identify theft. The gang victimized hundreds and possibly thousands of account holders by stealing their financial information and using it to transfer about $1.5 million to bogus accounts they controlled. Here, too, the group was very organized, as demonstrated by a chart created with i2 Analyst’s Notebook by Gary Warner.

All these examples support the position that Dave DeWalt discussed during Wednesday’s general session: “The bad guys are getting organized. This is not the hacker in your basement. We’re talking about organized crime, organized terrorism, and organized warfare,” DeWalt said. Identity theft, phishing, or fake alerts go through the Net. Faced with these threats, large organizations deploy solutions from multiple vendors because the truth is that no single vendor can meet all of their security and compliance needs. But today’s security threats and economic challenges demand that products from multiple vendors interoperate to provide better protection, reduce operational costs, and streamline the compliance lifecycle. This is why at FOCUS 09 DeWalt also reaffirmed his support of the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance (SIA). He described it as the “NATO” of security software, a call for a universal architecture for security standards and confirmed that McAfee is focused on improving partnerships and establishing an extended broader community through this innovative technology-partnering program.

Surrounded by a network of neon lights across the ceiling, walls of computer screens lit with grave headlines regarding our country’s digital dependence–drinking water, sewer systems, banks, government systems, all vulnerable to an electrical grid outage–I introduced my wife and my sixteen-year-old daughter to our latest McAfee endeavor, an exhibit contributor in the new International Spy Museum exhibit “Weapons of Mass Disruption.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Your humble narrator is part of a museum exhibit.

Nestled on the corner of 8th and F Streets in Washington, D.C., the International Spy Museum has become a must-see in our nation’s capital. It speaks to our country’s tales of espionage and the ultimate currency, intelligence. Never has a place been better suited to educate its visitors about the cybersecurity threats facing our government, our businesses, and you and me.

As former national intelligence director Admiral Michael McConnell mentioned during the exhibit’s opening event, the Internet has created an unprecedented level of vulnerability.

These threats, which could bowl you over in their magnitude and frequency, are constantly evolving, morphing into ever-changing but equally lethal pieces of malware–as diverse and fluid as Web 2.0 itself. In that stuff is our office, littered with Red Bull and Twinkies, where I and many other McAfee Labs researchers garner an understanding of the dark side of cyberspace activity. You know the saying: Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. It is this insight that yields information on breaking threats and a more holistic understanding of the black-hatted enemy.

So consider again the computer wall’s grave headlines in the exhibit: “The Pentagon’s IT system is probed 360 million times a day. Twitter crashed as a result of a denial of service attack against a Georgian proponent. Is our air traffic control system protected?”

The exhibit shouts the theme that we as an industry live and that I shared during my contribution interview. The threat is real. Even my daughter got a kick out of it.

I am excited to be involved in the joint industry effort of defining an XML format which will allow for the rapid exchange of information between security companies. This work was done by the “Malware Working Group” operating as part of the “Industry Connections Security Group” (ICSG) and under the umbrella of the IEEE. If you Google for “IEEE” and “ICSG” you should have the link at the top of the list – IEEE ICSG .

There were about 20 people from multiple security companies who contributed to the development of the proposal for the standard and I am very pleased with the results. It is a simple, flexible and powerful format that is already being used by 4 anti-malware companies to transmit meta-data about the prevalence of malware in the field. Wider adoption of this meta-data sharing will replace the trivial malware sample exchange of the past with a real-time exchange of threat intelligence data. Communicating the relationships between malware samples, domains, IPs will open endless possibilities for improving the security of all Internet users.

For example, it will allow us to describe the whole history of domains/IPs that were used by a specific malware writing group, which malware they hosted and even how the malware got installed onto users’ computers. And this can be expressed in an unambiguous way suitable for rapid automated analysis. In a word – it’s powerful!

But there are huge benefits even in trivial transmitting of the simplest malware prevalence data:

• If you are an anti-malware vendor you will be able to prioritize samples in your research queues.
• If you are a testing organization you will be able to create more relevant test sets (for example, downgrade rare and old samples).
• If you are an administrator you can submit consolidated field reports to anti-malware vendors and help make the Internet a safer place.

Here is how a portion of the XML with meta-data looks like.

If you are interested - the complete XML schema is available here and if you want to get involved please get in touch with your current point of contact at McAfee Labs.

Today we released our Q2 Threats Report. Some old trends have continued. Some new trends and threats have been established, and some old “friends” have even outdone themselves. Spam volumes have increased 141 percent since March, continuing the longest ever streak of increasing spam volumes. We also highlight the dramatic expansion of botnets and the threat from AutoRun malware.

More than 14 million computers have been enslaved by cybercriminal botnets, a 16 percent increase over last quarter’s rise. The report confirmed our first-quarter prediction that the surge in botnet growth would send spam levels to new heights, surpassing their previous peak in October 2008 before the takedown of the spam-hosting ISP McColo.

Our researchers also found that over the course of 30 days AutoRun malware had troubled more than 27 million files. AutoRun malware, which exploits Windows’ AutoRun capabilities, does not require any user clicks to activate, and is most often spread through portable USB and storage devices. The rate of detection surpasses even that of the infamous Conficker worm by 400 percent, making AutoRun one of the most prevalent pieces of malware in the world.

Some of the other areas we cover and discuss:

Cybercrime as a Service
As the number of botnets continues to grow, malware writers have begun to offer malicious software as a service to those who control these bots. By exchanging or selling resources, cybercriminals distribute new malware to wider audiences instantaneously. Programs like Zeus–an easy-to-use Trojan creation tool–continue to make the creation and management of malware even easier.

Cybercriminals Target Twitter, Social Networks
Twitter’s growth in popularity has made it a new target for cybercriminals in the last three months. Malware like the “Mikeey” worm and new variations of the Koobface Trojan attack users through tweets and abbreviated URLs. Spam Twitter accounts are becoming increasingly prevalent. Twitter administrative accounts have also been hacked on multiple occasions, giving cybercriminals access to the private accounts of celebrities and politicians, such as Britney Spears and Barack Obama and even allowing for the publication of sensitive internal strategy documents on the Web. Facebook and MySpace remain strong attack vectors for cybercriminals. In May, spam messages on social networks pointed users to more than 4,000 new Koobface binaries!

To view the McAfee Q2 Threats Report, go here.

McAfee Avert Labs will now produce more detailed documentation on prevalent threat families. The “Combating Threats” document series is designed to arm security staff within organizations with more information concerning prevalent threat families as well as to provide additional mitigation steps that can be taken. The first two documents in this series, “W32/Virut Family” and “Finding W32/Conficker.worm,” are now available via our blog, prior to our “Combating Threats” web page going live.

UPDATE MARCH 17th

Apologies for the busted links yesterday. All seem to be resolving fine now.

As the recession continues and unemployment rises, we foresee the top cybercrime trend for 2009 as the continued exploitation of the financial crisis to scam people with fake financial transactions services, bogus investment firms, and fraudulent legal services.

A related trend will be cybercriminals targeting people looking to advance or change their careers through further education. McAfee® Avert® Labs researchers have seen major spikes in diploma and advanced-schooling scams that have coincided with major corporate workforce reductions in the car manufacturing, chemical, and technology industries.

Our Main Threat Predictions/Trends for 2009:

• Threats on Social-Networking Sites. Cybercriminals no longer deliver threats only via spam. They are taking advantage of Facebook, MySpace, and other popular social-networking sites. McAfee expects this trend to continue throughout 2009, eventually displacing more traditional ways of malware distribution such as email.

• Personalized Threats Speak Your Language. McAfee expects to see the continued expansion of malware in languages other than English. Cybercriminals have come to realize that by diversifying into a global market they can access even larger pools of valuable identity and confidential information.

• Malware Targets Consumer Devices. McAfee expects increased attacks involving USB sticks and flash-memory devices used in cameras, picture frames, and other consumer electronics. This trend will continue due to the almost unregulated use of flash storage across enterprise environments as well as their popularity among consumers.

• Security Software Scams. The malware underworld is using mainstream practices in an effort to “sell” security software that is either misleading or outright fraudulent. McAfee expects this trend to continue.

• Abusing Free Web-Hosting/Blogging Services. Websites such as Geocities, Blogspot, and Live.com allow anyone to create a public website for free, without the authentication necessary when purchasing a domain-name website. This gives spammers the opportunity to run their underground business with minimal expense. Spam from do-it-yourself social-website-hosting providers arrives at its destination with far greater frequency than links pointing to domain names assigned by legitimate registrars. With little to no threat of punishment for their hosted content, and the new restrictions on short-term domain tasting, the attractiveness of free bandwidth offered by these sites will undoubtedly draw greater focus from malicious parties.

• More Targeted Phishing and Corporate Blackmailing. Botnets, a.k.a. zombie computers, that spread into corporate networks and financial datacenters will increasingly be used to gather sensitive information that can be used for blackmail or sold on the underground market.

• Browser-Based Attacks. Cybercriminals will increasingly attack via web browsers as they are the least-protected and, therefore, easiest way to transfer malware.

• Security Breaches of Confidential Data. Information that is managed by partner and subsidiary companies of bigger companies will be exposed more frequently, forcing an overhaul of data-security practices.

• An Increase in Localized Phishing Campaigns. Online scammers will increasingly target specific communities, especially on college campuses, where professional-looking emails claiming to be associated with the school’s financial or scholarship department will be blasted to all the students at the school. This is a significant danger to people who are just becoming responsible for their own finances.

• More Scams Involving Home Businesses. “Legitimate” home business scams generally involve either a pay-up-front and do-it-yourself kit, or a pay-to-play shell game of training and certification. We’ll see more of it on television, and the same infrastructure that supports diploma spam and confidence fraud will adjust to the new unemployment reality and will offer people some new bait on the old check-cashing scam.

• Increase in Forging and Abuse of Free Email Services. The free email services have started to allow accounts to send mails with arbitrary “from” addresses. This has increased the usability of these services significantly to businesses, but has also increased the “abusability” by spammers.

• McColo: The Effects of a Takedown. Spam traffic took a tremendous dive in volume when ISPs pulled the plug on spam host McColo Corp., the source of up to 60 percent of worldwide spam. In 2009, we expect to see a continued shift in organizations, from passive support of law enforcement to an active role of working collaboratively with ISPs and global Internet entities such as ICANN.

• New Businesses to Replace Lost McColo Hosting. Hosting companies will be set up in countries that are eager to embrace a burgeoning Internet market and will offer services to replace the disrupted command and control centers formerly hosted by McColo. These may be used as pawns by entities that perceive strategic value in sculpting the battlefield of the future.

In conclusion, McAfee recommends that you keep your security software up to date, implement layered defenses, and educate yourself on the trends of the day. Download our February Spam Report and 2009 Threat Predictions to read further and in more depth on these trends and issues. Remember: The cybercriminals read the same news that we do.

Malware continues to increase at a rapid rate. With the DAT-5516 release, scheduled for 4 February, the number of drivers in the DATs will pass 500,000. Half a million is a huge amount. I remember my first antivirus program, back in the ’80s, that had a count of about 80. I don’t recall the exact number, but it’s easy to place it into perspective. We add way more on a daily basis now.

However, our current count is not an absolute number of detected malware files; this can confuse many people. Drivers can be written very specifically, say one driver for one sample, but that’s not very effective. Most drivers are written to generically detect many samples. For example, one driver can detect 50 or as many as thousands of malware files. Therefore, the number of detected malware files is way higher then the half-million number reflected in the DATs. For another look at the complexity of counting malware detections, please see François Paget’s blog as well.

Initially VirusScan would focus just on true self-replicating viruses, mainly 8-bit (.com/.exe), MS-DOS viruses as well as boot viruses, which were prevalent then–and some still are today. Malware has evolved into many areas including, but not limited to, VBA, VBScript, JavaScript, 32-bit (pe-type .exe binaries) mass-mailers, 32-bit file infectors, mobile malware, adware and password stealers, and others. Nowadays the majority of malware is static Trojans.

There has also been a big shift by the malware authors. The first malware authors were hobbyists, writing to to prove it could be done, but today we mainly see malware that’s going after the money–password stealers, etc. Malware is often developed in professional environments, much like a business project with a plan.

Although there is malware for operating systems such as Mac OSX and the various Linux/Unix versions, most malware is still targeted at Microsoft Windows and its applications.

Last week, along with 1,200 other attendees from 47 countries, I was in Las Vegas at the FOCUS’08 McAfee Security Conference. In my opinion it was a great success; here are some on-the-spot comments.

On Tuesday, after the welcome session in which McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt announced, among others, the McAfee Initiative to Fight Cybercrime, I chose to hear my colleagues Toralv Dirro and Pedro Bueno present the state of cybercrime around the globe. In this session, the participants learned the actual methods used by cybercriminals: identity theft, phishing, password-stealing Trojans, virtual money laundering, and botnets. “The cybercrime industry is still booming,” the speakers explained. “It moves about US$100 billion per year and is the most successful sector of organized crime, growing 40 percent per year.”

Fortunately, the criminals do not win all the time. A supervisory special agent attached to the FBI Cyber Division gave us proof in the next session. Through example of “Alonzo X,” we learned how the police forces work to catch cybercriminals. Organizing and offering to sell parts of his botnet consisting of approximately 100,000 infected computers, Alonzo was responsible for sending thousands of spam between 2004 and 2007.

During this track, we learned that, as they do for drug rings, the FBI investigators infiltrate criminal operations. And they are sometimes on the horns of a dilemma: To help the inquiry, do they have the right to use for themselves a botnet they purchase and can they send themselves spam? We also learned how it was sometimes possible to calculate the fine by considering the expense for a computer repair ($200) and multiplying that amount times the number of infected computers. The police’s role is also to inform the victims that their computers are infected. It is not an easy task when you have a worldwide network of thousands zombie machines. Someone in the audience asked the agent how much Alonzo earned; the response was approximately $80,000 per year.

In the third track I attended, participants learned about the views of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. To introduce his talk, Brett Lambo, the Director of the Cyber Exercise Program, gave us a brief outline of the situation: Today malicious insiders and cybercriminals have both the capabilities and the intent to use the Internet as a playground. Other nations, which also have the capabilities, may have the intent, while terrorist groups may have the intent but do not possess capability. Then, Lambo explained America’s cyberinfrastructure serves as a vital link among 17 critical infrastructure and key resource sectors, as well as providing a fundamental element of all emergency response operations at the federal, state, and local government levels. Since 85 percent of the critical infrastructure in the United States is owned by the private sector, this unity between the cyber response community in the government and private sector will be essential to effective protection and defense.

On Monday afternoon, I was busy with my own session: “Malware on Second Life–Myth or Reality?” As businesses begin to embrace virtual worlds, there’s more and more money involved. I conducted some research on this platform to demonstrate that Trojans, worms, phishing, and counterfeiting activities were not a myth. Here’s one incident I found: Two teenagers, 15 and 14 years old, have been convicted for virtual theft in the Netherlands. They had stolen a virtual amulet and mask in the multiplayer RuneScape game by forcing another player to transfer the items under the threat of violence. One defendant was sentenced to 200 hours service, the other to 160 hours. Yes, threats in virtual worlds are a new cause for concern.

One of the Wednesday events was the talk by colleagues George Kurtz and Brian Kenyon (”Hacking Exposed Live 2008.”) The conference room was just large enough to accommodate all the people wishing to see the live demonstration of today’s most advanced attacks and exploits. Perhaps some attendees found this report too technical. For my part, I thank the authors for the 140-page booklet they offered to all the participants.

Also that day I could not miss the report by Joe Telafici (one of my managers and vice president of operations for McAfee Avert Labs) on the “Economics and Finances of Cybercrime.” After a well-documented threat report that demonstrated the business sense of cybercriminals, Telafici explained that we had to “change the equation” by reducing rewards and making the web harder to use for criminals. “We need a multifunctional, cross-discipline, standards-based approach at fixing the protocols and applications [TCP/IP, DNS, SMTP, HTTP(S)] that make up the Internet,” he concluded.

I started Thursday by participating in the Craig Schmugar track on “Sō’shəl Ěn’jə-nîr’ĭng.” Social engineering is one of the most successful tactics attackers can use in committing cybercrime–by enticing a potential victim into performing a distinct action. After some examples, my Avert colleague explained that crimeware defense strategies were rarely discussed in public. First, they concern the trade secrets of the anti-malware industry; and, second, they could help criminals in their bad work if they were circulating. Social engineering defense, however, is a bit different. Schmugar discussed social engineering characteristics (source, destination, circumstance, content type), inspecting metadata (freshness of content, file names, extensions, path, ADS, web domain and site names), considering static binary properties (container, file size, icon, use of “obscure” functionality and digital signatures) and considering the environment (service names and description, registry references).

Also on Thursday, the Dmitri Alperovitch talk grabbed my attention, and I did not hesitate to congratulate him after his presentation. The subject was “Organized Online Criminal Enterprises: Profile of Who, Where, and How.” Alperovitch offered an impressive list of criminals from Eastern countries (with supporting photos) involved in all sorts of cybercrime. It is easy to understand why the Alperovitch presentation now available on the Internet has many deleted sections. Seemingly, the crooks are all Russian or Ukrainian; and of course they use WebMoney. His example of stock manipulation was also very explicit. With some professional spammer tools and an Internet application able to manage “Exact Buy/Sell signals,” Alperovitch demonstrated that it is not difficult for a crook to make money. In his example, the “buy” flag for a peticular penny stock was fixed to $3.45 and the “sell” flag was set between $3.90 and $3.95. When the spammer launched his campaign, the stock cost about $3. The whole deal took just 8 hours, from purchase to sale. By manipulating 100,000 shares, the profit reached $50,000.

Now I am heading home to France preparing to inform my family about all the interesting and festive events I saw. See you next year at FOCUS’09!

Issue 5 of the publication formerly known as Sage has been released. This issue we take aim and tackle the rather murky subject of social engineering. We have nine excellent articles for you from some of our finest researchers as well as two academic experts. Some of the topics covered include:

The Origins of Social Engineering
Social Engineering 2.0 – What’s Next?
Vulnerabilities in the Equities Markets
The Future of Social Networking Sites
Typosquatting – Unintended Adventures in Browsing

Many aspects of social engineering are dissected and investigated as well, some not found anywhere else! Definitely worth the download and read.

Available here.

Today at Avert Labs, we released the third edition of Sage – our security journal. As always, we strive to be a bit different with our content in Sage. A little provocative, new trends, new ideas… And this issue is no different.

In this issue we look at the growing trend of localization in malware and threats. Cybercriminals are increasingly crafting attacks in multiple languages and are exploiting popular local applications to maximize their profits. Cybercrooks have become extremely deft at learning the nuances of the local regions and creating malware specific to each country. They’re not just skilled at computer programming—they’re skilled at psychology and linguistics, too.

We examined global malware trends in this report, titled “One Internet, Many Worlds.” The report is based on data compiled by our international security experts and examines the globalization of threats and the unique threats in different countries and regions. In the report, we detail the following trends and conclusions:

• Sophisticated malware authors have increased country-, language-, company-, and software-specific attacks
• Cyberattackers are increasingly attuned to cultural differences and tailor social engineering attacks accordingly
• Cybercrime rings recruit malware writers in countries with high unemployment and high levels of education such as Russia and China
• Cybercriminals take advantage of countries where law enforcement is lax
• Around the world, malware authors are exploiting the viral nature of Web 2.0 and peer-to-peer networks
• More exploits than ever before are targeted at locally popular software and applications

Download Sage 3

Recently, I had some friends complain about problems with Real Media files (*.rm/*.rmvb). According to them, after downloading and playing rmvb files, the Real Media Player launched a malicious webpage without prompting. Later, they noticed their OS running noticeably slower. And later still, they found their IM account passwords modified and online gaming accounts stolen.

It appears that the media files they downloaded were created by a hacker and designed to open malicious webpages. I investigated this and found it is quite easy to add a malicious webpage to rmvb files. The hacker used freely available software. These programs include applications which can be used to add events to rmvb files. A time and URL is specified in a text file, then imported into the rmvb file using these programs, and that’s it!. When the rmvb file is opened in RealPlayer, the URL will automatically be opened after the specified time has elapsed. My advice was to scan any downloaded media files with antivirus software before playing it. Another option is to use a different player other than RealPlayer.

Hope you can enjoy Real Media without the malicious webpages!!!