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alliedvoa.com
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Weblog of F-Secure Antivirus Research Team
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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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. Send it to your friends and family.
Signing off,
Sean
On 10/03/10 At 05:00 PM
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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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 where slightly off — it's been corrected. On 09/03/10 At 03:30 PM
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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
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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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
Charlie Miller, the Pwn2Own contest winner for two years in a row, gives his take on Internet security. Guess what — your Mac OS is no less vulnerable than its Microsoft Windows counterpart.
Windows 7 or Snow Leopard, which of these two commercial OS will be harder to hack and why?
Windows 7 is slightly more difficult because it has full ASLR (address space layout randomization) and a smaller attack surface (for example, no Java or Flash by default). Windows used to be much harder because it had full ASLR and DEP (data execution prevention). But recently, a talk at Black Hat DC showed how to get around these protections in a browser in Windows.
No operating system and browser is immune to an attack. And, Flash is the bane of security (well, one of it anyway).
In your opinion, which is the safer combination OS+browser to use?
That's a good question. Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7 with no Flash installed. There probably isn't enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about. The main thing is not to install Flash!
The interview was conducted by Matteo Campofiorito at OneITSecurity. You can read the full version here. On 02/03/10 At 03:42 AM
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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
Moscone Center, San Francisco, USA is the site of this week's RSA Conference 2010. It's the world's largest information security industry conference with well over 10,000 attendees. For some perspective on just how big it is: there are 19 different tracks of talks going on at the same time given by 556 speakers.
This year we have three talks being presented by fellows of F-Secure:
Mikko has two presentations, "Case m00p" and "Mobile Malware in 2010".
Antti and Kimmo are presenting "Rootkits in the Real World Today".
Browse through RSA's session catalog here.
On 01/03/10 At 04:56 PM
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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
We've been seeing a gradual shift in malicious PDF file coding (no surprise there, we know malware authors can and do adapt their techniques).
For a long time, we saw malicious PDF files that were simple enough to allow us to readily decipher the intent of the malicious code — shell code, download/execute, drop and load, et cetera.
Now we're seeing more and more complex obfuscation being used, which requires us to break down the PDF file. This can make an Analyst's daily life more miserable or interesting, especially as the obfuscation can bypass automated analysis tools and even AV detectors.
One technique I've encountered in the last few months uses Adobe-specific JavaScript objects such as getPageNthWord and getPageNumWords. Here's a screenshot of one example:
Note how it uses old-school style spacings. Comments in the notepad were added for easier readability.
Anyway, once this is normalized, it becomes something much easier to read and analyze:
An interesting analysis about PDF obfuscation is also available at SANS.
Response post by — Zimry On 01/03/10 At 10:11 AM
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03/11/2010 04:00 AM
We've received some questions regarding recent phishing attacks conducted against Twitter.com.
Tweets and Direct Messages (DM) containing phases such as "This you??" or "LOL is this you" are linking victims towards a Twitter login phishing page. If the bait is taken and victim enters their password, Twitter's infamous "fail whale" is displayed and the user is returned to their account. They might not even realize that their account details have been compromised.
Phishing attacks directed against Twitter are not new. But what's the point?
Trust.
Peers within a social network have a greater level of trust amongst themselves.
And so why the recent attacks?
We think it could have something to do with some of the recent search engine deals that have been made.
Yahoo announced that they'll begin to include Twitter's real-time feed into their search results and Facebook is now included in Google's search results.
The bad guys can use social networking trust to enhance their SEO attacks.
Lets take a current hot topic as an example. There are several Twitter results in the image below.
Note: Always be careful when searching for hot topics. This "sea world trainer killed" example is currently being used in SEO attacks and many results will lead directly to scamware.
There's also a Facebook result in the example above. We expect to see fresh phishing attacks against Facebook before too long.
Twitter's Safety and Spam feeds are useful to follow if you have a Twitter account. Twitter's working on the issue now by prompting those that received phishing messages to change their password.
There is a silver lining to all of this…
While social networking trust can be abused, social networks themselves are incredibly responsive to emerging threats.
Check out the latest search results for "This you??". Twitter users are already spreading information to counter the dis-information pushed by the bad guys.
It used to take weeks to stamp out e-mail hoaxes. Now, the issue almost corrects itself as quickly as it is abused.
On 25/02/10 At 03:12 PM
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