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alliedvoa.com
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Weblog of F-Secure Antivirus Research Team
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
We regularly learn of cases where criminals have gained access to credit card numbers via keyloggers, skimmers or online hacks.
Once they have the credit card numbers, they basically have three ways to turn them into cash:
- Sell them
- Make fraudulent purchases on them
- Create real-world cards out of them
To create real-world cards, you need blank cards to start with. These are known in the underground as "blank plastic".
And there are online stores for blank plastic. Here are some pictures from one:
Above: Collection of "blank" Visa and Master Card cards.
Above: Gold embossing demo. Still missing the hologram sticker.
Above: Finished product. Notice the card holder's name...
PS. Also see our post about credit card holograms. On 18/03/10 At 03:42 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
Buying and selling stock online is big business. It also carries it's own risks. And we don't mean the risk of doing bad investments; we mean loosing access to your trading account because your computer got infected by a keylogger.
Take a case of Mr. Valery Maltsev from St. Petersburg.
Maltsev runs an investment company called Broco Investments (available online at www.brocompany.com).
Unfortunately (to him), Maltsev was yesterday charged by US Securities & Exchange commission.
They claim that Maltsev's extraordinary gains in thinly traded NASDAQ and NYSE stocks were not a co-incidence. Apparently Maltsev used malware with keyloggers to gain access to other people's online trading accounts. With such accounts, he could buy stocks at inflated prices, and use his real account to sell the same stock, for instant gains.
Quoting from the SEC Complaint:
On December 21,2009, at 13:37, BroCo bought shares of Ameriserv Financial, Inc (ASRV) at a price of $1.51 per share. Approximately one minute later, three accounts at Scottrade were illegally accessed and used to purchase shares of ASRV at prices ranging from $1.545 to $1.828 per share. While this was happening, BroCo sold shares of ASRV at prices ranging from $1.70 to $1.80 per share, finishing at 13:52. By trading shares of ASRV within minutes of unauthorized trading through the compromised accounts, Maltsev and BroCo grossed $141,500 in approximately fifteen minutes, realizing a net profit of $17,760.
Here's the stock chart for Ameriserv Financial. You can clearly see the unusually high trading levels on December 21st.
SEC claims that overall, Maltsev made more than $250,000. More details in the original SEC Complaint (PDF file)
And this is not the first time we've seen this. There was a very similar case in 2006, where Mr. Jevgeny Gashichev was running a fake Estonian company called Grand Logistics
His tactic was almost identical: he used keyloggers and phishing attacks to gain access to stock trading passwords, inflated the price of a penny stocks and cashed in.
SEC claims that Gashichev made more than $350,000. Again, more details in the original SEC Complaint (PDF file) On 17/03/10 At 01:50 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
Over the years, we have multiple times posted examples of what kind of booby-trapped document files have been used in targeted (espionage) attacks.
For example:
However, we've rarely shown how these documents were delivered to the targeted, i.e. what the emails looked like.
For that kind of information, we can recommend you to visit a blog called Contagio Malware Dump.
This blog, run by Mila & co analyses targeted attacks in detail, typically showing the original spoofed emails that started the attacks.
Some good examples below — some of them are quite convincing. Would you have opened the PDFs?
More at: contagiodump.blogspot.com On 16/03/10 At 02:56 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
An Estonian virus writer has been sentenced to jail in Harju, Estonia.
The author of the Allaple virus family, 44-year old Mr. Artur Boiko pleaded not guilty.
Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to 2 years and 7 months in prison.
Allaple is a complex worm using polymorphic encryption. It spreads over network shares and by modifying local HTML files. When such HTML files are uploaded to public websites, they spread the infection further.
Apparently Mr. Boiko had been in a car accident and had ended up in dispute over his insurance claim with If Insurance. As a result, his worm launches DDoS attacks against these sites:
www.if.ee (website of the insurance company)
www.online.if.ee (customer online interface of the insurance company)
www.starman.ee (website of a local ISP)
The DDoS attacks were quite serious — see this post from ISC Diary in 2007.
We detected several variants of Allaple during 2006-2007. The problem is that this is not a botnet — these worms have no command and control channel. The infected machines will attack their targets until they are cleaned. There are still thousands of active, infected computers today around the world, and they are still attacking. And the worm is still spreading further.
Snapshot from F-Secure interface showing new samples on 11th of March 2010
Boiko was sentenced to prison, where he has already been awaiting his trial for 19 months. He was also sentenced to pay the following sums to cover losses:
To If Insurance: 5.1 Million Estonian Kroons (about 330000 Euros or 450000 USD)
To Starman ISP: 1.4 Million Estonian Kroons (about 91000 Euros or 130000 USD)
More info (in Estonian) from ERR Uudised On 11/03/10 At 11:20 AM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
F-Secure has an additional blog that launched today. It's called Safe and Savvy.
You'll notice that the name is pink. That's part of our new brand but it also reflects the authorship. Safe and Savvy's contributors are the female employees of F-Secure (mostly).
Hetta, Marja, Annika, Alia, Melody-Jane, (and Jason) have already gotten started.
Read more of Hetta's latest post to learn about six free months of our Internet Security 2010.
On 10/03/10 At 05:29 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
I wasn't sure I'd see this Browser Choice update:
I set my computer's Regional Options for the United States even though it's physically located in Finland (I'm an American after all).
Regional settings might trump my IP address, I thought… but it seems not. I manually ran Microsoft Update and was provided access to KB976002. Cool.
If you're located outside of Europe and are wondering what's this is all about, read this from the BBC.
Microsoft is offering alternative browser options to European Windows users to settle an anti-trust lawsuit. The update component points users to browserchoice.eu — from where they can select from 12 different web browsers.
On a somewhat not completely unrelated note: Microsoft Security Advisory (981374) was published yesterday.
"Microsoft is investigating new, public reports of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7."
The vulnerability could allow for remote code execution.
Once again, that browser choice link is browserchoice.eu. Share it with your family and friends.
Signing off,
Sean
On 10/03/10 At 05:00 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
ATM skimmers are installed like this:
Video source: Spiegel.de & German Federal Criminal Office (Bundeskriminalamt) On 10/03/10 At 12:06 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
Microsoft schedules its security updates on the second Tuesday of the month. Adobe recently began following this schedule as well, and while there are no Adobe updates today, there was an out-of-cycle security update two weeks ago.
That update should now be applied if you haven't already done so.
Why?
Because we're now seeing the vulnerability (CVE-2010-0188) being exploited in targeted attacks (Microsoft also).
Our sample was submitted by a European financial organization and the file name includes a reference to the G20. The exploit drops a downloader and attempts to make a connection to tiantian.ninth.biz. We detect this attack as Exploit:W32/PDFExploit.G.
It doesn't surprise us to see this Adobe Reader vulnerability utilized so quickly.
Looking through our sample management system, we see a growing number of targeted attack files.
There were 1968 files in 2008. The number was 2195 during the year 2009. That isn't a very large increase in the overall total from 2008 to 2009 but we did see a greater percentage targeting Adobe.
And how about the first two months of 2010?
Well, so far the number is 895, which will more than double last year's number if the current pace continues.
The percentage targeting Adobe Reader continues to rise.
Here's a graph with a breakdown of the most common attack vectors used in targeted (espionage) attacks:
Updated to add: A couple of readers noticed that our graph's 2009 percentages were slightly off — it's been corrected. On 09/03/10 At 03:30 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
As "JiLsi" — one of the online criminals from Darkmarket — was sentenced last week to almost five years in prison, we have received some media queries on the case.
In particular, one journalist wanted to know what JiLsi (aka Renu Subramaniam), Matrix001 (aka Markus Kellerer) and Cha0 (aka Çağatay Evyapan) looked like when they were posting to the Darkmarket forum.
So I went back to my notes and dug up example posts from the guys, complete with their avatar icons. Perhaps these are interesting for our blog readers too.
Cheers,
Mikko On 08/03/10 At 11:19 AM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
Somebody is trying to pose as us. If you see an email like the one below, please ignore it:
From: security@f-secure.com
Reply-To: securitysupport@hotxf.com
Subject: Security Maintenance.F-Secure HTK4S
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 18:11:05 -0000
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Dear Email Subscriber,
Your e-mail account needs to be improved with our new
F-Secure HTK4S anti-virus/anti-spam 2010-version.
Fill in the columns below or your account will be
temporarily excluded from our services.
E-mail Address:
Password:
Phone Number:
Please note that your password is encrypted
with 1024-bit RSA keys for increased security.
Management.
Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved.
Before you ask: No, we've never heard of "F-Secure HTK4S anti-virus" either.
On 05/03/10 At 10:26 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
Just when we thought SEO using Flash was as interesting as SEO poisoning can get, it seems it's getting even sneakier…
Imagine a PDF file posted by someone evil online. Of course, Google being Google, the file is recognized as a PDF.
And when we open it, it really is a PDF. No evil codes inside, just a good old vanilla PDF file.
Three hours later… Google still says the file is a PDF. Brod (one of our geeky guys here) is attributing this to Google's cache.
But is it really a PDF this time around?
It morphed! And it even has different topics this time. Topics which, when you follow them, will lead you to another PDF:
At least for a few hours before it becomes…
It's a vicious cycle, but a pretty neat trick. Who would suspect a non-malicious PDF file right? At least before it becomes an HTML file. And the end result is a rogue antivirus scam.
Response post by — Christine and Mina On 05/03/10 At 07:00 AM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
Another day, another news, and well… another SEO poisoning stint.
Using PDF files in SEO poisoning is recent, but not exactly fresh news. So we were thinking of just adding the malicious URLs to our Browsing Protection and creating detections for the corresponding files… Then, we saw something:
Ok, could be a one time thing, so we checked the other sites:
And in the usual geeky fashion in the lab… we got excited.
When decompressed, the SWF contains this:
Since a lot of websites use SWF, most users have already installed Flash support in their browsers, thereby also enabling support for the malware behavior.
The SWF is of course the key to getting to:
It seems that the bad guys want the malicious URLs to be hidden inside the SWF.
Perhaps it makes them sleep better at night thinking that their sites won't be discovered very soon.
The malicious URLs are now blocked via our Browsing Protection and malicious files are detected.
Response post by — Christine and Mina On 04/03/10 At 10:06 AM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
Remember Microsoft's action against 277 Waledac domains last week? Well, that's one way of going after a botnet…
Another way of shutting down a botnet? Arrest the botmasters!
Three Spanish citizens have been arrested for running the "Mariposa" botnet. The three reportedly have no criminal records and have limited hacking skills. Mariposa is a Butterfly Kit based botnet, and the kit is no longer for sale.
Details are available from the BBC and The Register. Kudos to those involved in the arrests. On 03/03/10 At 04:43 PM
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03/18/2010 11:07 PM
Criminals like to attack the biggest target because BIGGER generally provides a better Return On Investment (ROI). Windows is a good example. Mac is indeed safer than Windows but it isn't necessarily because Mac is more secure. Windows has a larger market share and that equals more potential victims.
How about search engines? What is the biggest search engine on the block? Google — and the bad guys know it. The result?
It's becoming less and less safe to search via Google.
Yesterday, I was testing Internet Explorer 8 and made a typo in the address bar. Instead of update.microsoft.com I used updates.
There is no such domain, so Microsoft Bing kicked in and I ended up with the following search results:
What? No results?!?
So I searched for updates.microsoft.com with Google.
Did I mean update? Yeah, I guess so… Thanks.
Bing's results seemed sort of odd so I examined the settings and it turned out to be some idiosyncrasy of Finnish based results.
Changing the settings to the United States produced the following:
Better.
I continued testing Bing. Here's a Bing search for microsoft updates:
84,700,000 results.
Here's a Google search for the same:
90,900,00 results.
But how about something timely? Using Google trends, I found a hot search topic.
Minnesota's appliance rebate program has 5m dollars to give its citizens for buying energy efficient appliances, e.g. refrigerators.
The program launched on Monday and its web site was quickly overwhelmed; the event generated many searches.
Here's the Bing search for "mn appliance rebate":
25,300 results.
And Google?
31,300 results.
But here's an important difference — I didn't find any harmful links from Bing's results.
Google, on the other hand, had many bad links. This was the sixth result on the first page:
Clicking the link launched a rogue scam:
And then I was given the typical scan scam crap that is so profitable for the bad guys:
The site pushed this file:
It's now detected as Rogue:W32/FakeAlert.LB.
The folks at Google work hard to filter out harmful search results, but it's a difficult task.
The bad guys are constantly working against Google and they often get past their defenses long enough to infect victims. So what can you do stay safe? Avoid monoculture — try something else.
Because soon enough… Bing just might be the search engine that you want to bring home to your mom.
Google has been around and is simply receiving too much attention from the wrong sorts of guys.
Ask you yourself this: Do you feel lucky?
Signing off,
Sean
On 02/03/10 At 04:24 PM
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