Industry Intel

By Mel Morris

From Stuxnet to Sony, a number of cyberattacks emerged in 2011 that experts have predicted for quite some time. I predict 2012 will be even more pivotal, thrusting cybersecurity into the spotlight. These are my top seven forecasts for the year ahead:

1) Targeted, zero-day attacks will be the norm.
Looking back over the past year, an increasing number of breaches were the result of custom malware and exploits targeting specific enterprises. I predict 2012 will be the year of targeted attacks, which have slowly evolved from large-scale threats to unique attacks designed to infect a handful of very specific people.  Traditional blacklist and signature approaches have already become ineffective; once a virus is spotted, malware writers simply create a new one. As targeted, zero-day attacks intensify, more security vendors will realize the pressing need to analyze threats and behavior more holistically.

2) 2012 will be the start of a revolution.
For the last several years, the security industry and cybercriminals have had a symbiotic relationship that has kept the market in balance. The “good guys” have done just enough to thwart attacks – and the bad guys haven’t needed to dramatically evolve as they’re still making money doing exactly what they’re doing. I predict the scales will tip in the coming year. More innovative and effective security technology will drive a revolution and we’ll see a heated battle emerge between security companies and cybercriminals. It’s survival of the fittest.  As soon as cloud-based technology and behavioral protection strengthen their foothold in the antimalware sector, hackers and cyber mafias will up the ante and scope out new vulnerabilities.

3) Cyber threats will gain political traction.
The Stuxnet worm is an example of something we detected long ago, and its impact has now taken on a whole new meaning. The virus’s sophisticated ability to infiltrate government systems, silently gather information, and disable nuclear power plants has prompted a wakeup call, driving leaders to reassess federal technology standards and regulations. Stuxnet gives us a very real and very scary glimpse of what’s to come.

4)  Masses will migrate to cloud platforms.
Now that Cloud has an “i” front of it, the cloud will truly hit the mainstream. The appeal of file sharing and remote access will be a major draw for an increasingly tech savvy population that connects to the Internet from tablets, smartphones, and multiple PCs. This will not only drive widespread adoption of cloud-based tools and applications amongst consumers, but it will dramatically accelerate migration in the business world. Many companies are already on board with cloud platforms and applications, but the power of the masses will act as a tipping point, pushing the vast majority of IT professionals to shun old-school, on-premise approaches and look to the cloud for infrastructure and data solutions.

5) Your smartphone will be a target. Security companies have done a fairly good job of stopping attacks at the endpoint, and this will lead cybercriminals to focus their efforts more heavily on mobile devices, which are still quite vulnerable in today’s environment. We will see an increase in Android and iPhone attacks: rogue apps, malicious links, and spyware targeted at smartphones and tablets. It’s all about data, and business users and consumers alike store an abundance of highly sensitive and poorly guarded information on their mobile devices.

6) Legitimate applications will be used for illegitimate activities.
Rogue Android apps are just the tip of the iceberg. We load our mobile devices with applications that are designed to simplify our lives, yet we don’t stop to consider what else they are capable of – or what someone is capable of manipulating them to do. Even legitimate apps can grab information and use it without our permission. A simple glance at an application like Plane Finder illustrates the vast amount of data that is at anyone’s fingertips. And that’s not to mention the many other opportunities roaming devices present; a criminal could leverage a mobile device to pick up data from a nearby network, or hack into a plane’s WiFi connection and send signals to devices left in improper flight mode.

7) Our weakest link will be strengthened.
When it comes to security, the weakest link has always been people. In 2012, indifference toward security will diminish. Businesses will invest in security and strengthen duty of care measures. Employees and consumers will see the ramifications of breaches and begin incorporating smart Internet practices into their everyday behaviors.

By the Webroot Threat Team

Two of NASA’s satellites were hacked during 2007 and 2008, according to a draft report to be officially released later this month. According to the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission, the ‘birds’, which focused on Earth observation for tasks such as climate monitoring, were reportedly pwned by the attackers, to the extent that they could have taken total control of the systems, had they wished.

The Landsat-7 earth observation satellite was hacked into for twelve minutes, during October 2007 and July 2008. The Terra AM-1 earth observation satellite was disrupted for two minutes in June 2008, and attackers enjoyed another nine-minute ride in October that year.

It’s all a bit scary, isn’t it? Mostly, security professionals focus on botnets, auction scams and spam. We rarely if ever cast our eyes and our thoughts skywards – and there are a lot of things floating around up there.

As of August, there were at least 965 operational satellites in orbit around the world, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The breakdown of these satellites is as follows:

• 443 were launched by the US
• 101 were launched by Russia
• 69 were launched by China

These satellites perform a broad spectrum of functions, ranging from scientific research, commercial/business purposes, and various military functions.

These are the ones that are known about; there are doubtless a few unclassified birds up there, too, probably with powerful lenses, among other things. With valuable data on everything from commercial inventory to ATM data flying around, how safe are all these things from attack?

Not very, as it turns out. One of the biggest problems for satellite manufacturers is that once a bird is up there, it isn’t that easy to nip up and patch a piece of equipment.

read more…

By Mike Johnson

As a follow-up to the Blackhole Exploit posting, I thought I would share one aspect of my job that I truely enjoy: Discovery.

While investigating some active urls being served up via a blackhole kit, I noticed something quite odd, as I would end up on sites that had malicious code injected into their webpages.

Once the redirection to the blackhole kit was initiated, I saw the usual exploits taking place, first being Internet Explorer and Adobe Flash, then onto Adobe Reader and Java.

This time, the kit didn’t stop there. Internet Explorer proceeded to launch Windows Media Player. Since I had never used it on this test machine, the Windows Media Player install sequence initiated, causing the windows media player setup screen to appear in order to finalize its installation.

I became curious as to what Windows Media Player is being used for. Unfortunately in this case, I couldn’t see where any files were called down to the machine and did not have any type of network analyzer running.

read more…

By the Webroot Threat Team

It’s a creepy treat, with a serious underlying message. The latest viral website uses a horror movie format to show you just how much the average Facebook application can find out about you.

TakeThisLollipop, which has already received 1.7 million ‘Likes’ on Facebook, uses the social network’s application authentication scheme to find out about users.

Anyone clicking on the lollipop displayed on the site is asked to let the application access a panoply of information about them from Facebook, in addition to other privileges, such as posting as them. If they accept, they get to see the application’s payload: a video in which an unhinged man views their Facebook account, growing increasingly distressed as he looks at their pictures, wall posts, and friends’ status updates.

The whole thing is incredibly well done. It ends with the disturbed Facebook stalker driving towards your location (you knew that Facebook stored your hometown location, right?) and getting out of the car in a menacing fashion. Taped to his dashboard is a Polaroid, containing your profile picture. Chilling stuff.

What is even more chilling is the fact that this website is able to harvest so much information about you after you click the ‘Allow’ button in the dialogue box that it throws up. What else have you allowed access to, and how much do these applications know about you?

There is an even more important question: who is writing these Facebook apps, that harvest your most intimate personal and social data? There are seven million web sites and applications integrated with Facebook, many of which request privileged access to your account data before they will give you what the developers promise. Most people blindly allow these applications access, without thinking about where the information might be going.

It takes almost no effort to become a Facebook developer. The company introduced some basic developer verification procedures last year, such as providing a credit card number, or a mobile phone number. But of course, we know how many credit cards are stolen each year, don’t we? And how many mobile phones are stolen or cloned each week?

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Websites Hosting Android Trojans  

By Armando Orozco and  Nathan Collier

Rogue Android apps are making their way into alternative markets. Yes, we’ve seen some malicious apps trickle through and they can be elusive. But we’re now seeing markets that are only hosting malware. These rogues are of the premium rate SMS variety and request the user to send a bounty if they want the app. The interesting thing is that the websites they’re hosted on are very well put together and you can see that a great deal of time was put into creating them.

 The Websites

Click for Full Size

These well-crafted websites follow a similar layout; they have device reviews, app descriptions with screenshots, QR Codes and FAQs. So far, we’ve only found these websites aimed at Russian users, with the web pages written in Russian. The descriptions are similar to those in the Android Market and the screenshots appear to be taken from the market.  We are discovering that this network of SMS Trojans is fairly large. read more…

By Mike Johnson

Several weeks back, I was presented with a group of snapshots from an active BlackHole Exploit Kit 1.2 Control Panel.

As with other toolkits I’ve seen in the wild, this one has all the makings of some real bad medicine. The authors have yet again gone to the trouble of making this toolkit incredibly easy to use and widely available for a price. Just a little unsavory web hosting in a country with few or no diplomatic relations and off to the races they go.

It appears this toolkit is configurable in both Russian and English, making one wonder its true origins.

I’ve slowly tracked URLs accompanying this toolkit and watched it dish out some very widely undetected malware, such as:

Information Stealing/Banking Trojans:
SpyEye
Zeus
Carberp
Mebroot Rootkit

Another more popular rootkit we’re seeing very widely on the Webroot realtime watch is: vSirefef.B/Zero-Access.

BlackHole toolkit preys on only two items in a user’s machine:

1) Unpatched operating system exploits

2) Internet browsers, add-in and plugin exploits such as Adobe and Java Software

Here are some of the known exploits the kit can execute on a victim’s machines.

Windows Operating Systems:
CVE-2010-1885 HCP (Microsoft Windows Help and Support Center in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/MS10-042

CVE-2006-0003 IE MDAC
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms06-014

Adobe Software:
CVE-2008-2992 Adobe Reader util.printf
CVE-2009-0927 Adobe Reader Collab GetIcon
CVE-2007-5659 Adobe Reader CollectEmailInfo

Java Software:
CVE-2009-1671 Java buffer overflows in the Deployment Toolkit ActiveX control in deploytk.dll
CVE-2010-0840 Java trusted Methods Chaining Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
CVE-2010-0842 Java JRE MixerSequencer Invalid Array Index Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
CVE-2010-0886 Java Unspecified vulnerability in the Java Deployment Toolkit component in Oracle Java SE
CVE-2010-1423 Java argument injection vulnerability in the URI handler in Java NPAPI plugin

The basic view the bot controller has is of the statistics page, which should indicate why I listed some of the expoits this toolkit is using. Not surprisingly, for as young as the kit is, you can see that both the Java and Adobe softwares are exploited far more than any others.

I’m sure some think they are safe using a browser other than Internet Explorer but it appears from this image there isn’t alot of difference in how this toolkit has  behaved between the three browsers it’s touched.

As the authors have made this toolkit easy to use, they have also made it easy to maintain a low detection rate on the binaries by using an antivirus scanning service which does not share any binaries collected with the AV industry.

The easy-to-read statistics page make it simple for the controller to view and monitor how well or poor the current bot is doing — how many operating systems it’s infected, what type of operating systems were infected, and in which countries they’re located.

read more…

By Jacques Erasmus

I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, and last night I pinpointed why. October has presented me with a perfect storm of Internet security developments: I embarked on my first few weeks as chief information security officer for Webroot amidst the most significant consumer product launch the company has ever had.

These activities alone would’ve been enough to keep corporate security top of mind 24/7, but their occurrence during Cyber Security Awareness Month further drove it home for me. So I thought perhaps it may be cathartic for me, and helpful for you, if I shared some of the risk scenarios I’ve been thinking about, and best practices for protecting yourself and your organization from them.

Scenario One: Network-based infections.
Many organizations have solid standards for securing all of the desktop and laptop computers their employees use to locally and remotely access the corporate network. But all it takes is one contractor with an infected laptop to connect to the corporate network and expose sensitive corporate and customer information to malware. Think of it from a physical security aspect: like strangers in the building, you’d want to prevent rogue access points. The way we’re protecting ourselves at Webroot is by using our SecureAnywhere anti-malware technology to interface with network access control devices to ensure they’re clean before connecting to the network.

Scenario Two: Web app vulnerabilities.
SQL injections enable criminals to harvest passwords, bank account numbers and other personal information you may use for online transactions on seemingly safe sites. Man in the middle attacks — in which an attacker intercepts a communication between a customer and the server it’s intended to reach – are made possible by poor coding standards or poor input validation on web forms. Gaps like these enable injectors to change the fields where you enter your validation information in order to facilitate the heist. To the user, the site URL also may appear dodgy. Developers, it’s critical that you employ secure coding standards for web applications.

Scenario Three: Targeted Attacks.
This last scenario is more like a billion rolled into one; IT administrators as well as individual web users should have a healthy dose of concern about targeted attacks. Malware authors can customize Trojans for the specific environment they want to attack and the specific data they plan to steal, such as source code, financial information and customer data.

Advanced persistent threats like this typically penetrate organizations via social engineering tactics like spoofed emails that are designed to look like they’re coming from a trusted source. Employees who receive one of these emails and do what the message asks them to do are unwittingly triggering an exploit; clicking a link or opening a PDF, flash or QuickTime file leads to a drive-by download.

Here’s a real-world example that will give you a good idea of why the targeted attack is the most dangerous risk scenario of them all:

Bank tellers at a financial institution we were working with received an email under the name of someone at the company they knew and trusted. The email claimed their CEO was going to appear on TV and they’d need to register for a certain website in order to view the show online at their desks. A few of the tellers clicked a link in the email and landed on a website which told them to install a tool to view videos.

It turns out the tool the tellers installed was actually the SpyEye Trojan, and the criminal had done his homework. He knew this bank had an international wire transfer interface; he also knew that in order to use the bank’s wire transfer interface, you need to be inside the bank’s network to initiate the transfers, and you’d need to infect more than one teller because the bank uses dual control to enable a wire transfer. So infecting two employees was the ideal entry point.

While the tellers were working, the criminal created a second online session and made three very sizeable transfers to three remote geographies. And since the crime happened late on a Friday, the financial institution was unprepared to stop the transfers, ultimately losing thousands and thousands of dollars.

The good news is a number of measures can thwart this kind of attack:

IT administrators, keep in mind the easiest point of entry for a cybercriminal is your weakest link: Your employees. Educate your employees on spotting a fake.

Web users, if you’re online at work or at home and aren’t sure if the URL in a suspicious email is dangerous, check it out on whois.net or DomainTools.com. If you’re sending emails or transacting online outside of the office, make sure the sites you’re using are https websites. Otherwise your password can be sniffed on an unsecured network.

By Michael Johnson

At Webroot we’ve been researching and chronicling developments with SpyEye since we first saw it in April 2010. This nasty Trojan is the successor to the Zeus Trojan, and it became essentially the main rootkit available for sale after the author of ZeuS left the underground market and sold ZeuS sources to the SpyEye team.

Over the last six months, through Webroot’s real-time watch technology and through my own adventures hunting malware proactively in my spare time, I’ve noticed an extreme escalation of SpyEye infections.

Last week I came across a URL for a password-protected site and at first didn’t think very much of it. But once I logged in, I realized I was on the administrator’s page of a SpyEye Panel, with what appeared to be full access. The administration panel was so easy to run, a fifth grader could do it.

At first glance, there were about 3,000 bots with approximately 600 active at the moment I was looking. The site was moved four days later which at that point, the number of bots was quickly approaching 10,000.

Now some of this is started to make sense. The authors of SpyEye have made it so simple to operate and  in case of any trouble, apparently provide support promptly. Their selling points are working quite effectively and a lot of the wrong type of people are able to acquire the builders, Command and Control Servers for a small amount of money.

Taking a look at some of the screenshots, it doesn’t look very nice from any view.

read more…

A couple of days ago researchers for Android Police wrote about a security vulnerability in several HTC phones. The vulnerability lies with logging tools installed by HTC. These logging tools collect personal data like user accounts, email addresses, GPS info and SMS data. Having these tools logging users data is one thing but the fact that they are left unsecured and available to be exploited by a 3rd party app is a big blow to the device manufacturer. A 3rd party app would only need to request the INTERNET permission to gain access to the information collected by the tools. Why HTC has these tools in place hasn’t been answered, an answer they’ll have to provide to their customers at some point.

 
HTC’s public statement: “In our ongoing investigation into this recent claim, we have concluded that while this HTC software itself does no harm to customers data, there is a vulnerability that could potentially be exploited by a malicious third-party application. A third party malware app exploiting this or any other vulnerability would potentially be acting in violation of civil and criminal laws. So far, we have not learned of any customers being affected in this way and would like to prevent it by making sure all customers are aware of this potential vulnerability.”

The update will be sent over-the-air and users will receive a notification to install. No word on when the update will be available.

 
We all have a role to play in keeping our computing secure, but developers have a key role in that they need to ensure their applications are secure when it comes to customer’s data. This happens a lot, most recently with Skype, hopefully with more and more big name vendors being called out we’ll see developers tighten up their code.

Affected phones

EVO 4G

EVO 3D

Thunderbolt

EVO Sensation

MyTouch 4G slide

The past couple of days have been very busy for a lot of people, following the announcement by Microsoft that they had discovered a new network worm called Morto. After reading the refreshingly thorough writeup about Morto from both Microsoft and our partner Sophos, we were surprised to find that a few of our customers had been infected — and cleaned up — beginning with some poor schlub in South Africa as early as July 23rd, but the worm kicked into high gear last Thursday and began to propagate rapidly.

But, as much as the technical details in these posts are useful for researchers and analysts, they don’t really get to the heart of how a user of an infected computer would be affected by the worm. So, after spending a bit of time infecting some of my own machines these past couple days, I wanted to share my hands-on experience with you.

Bottom line, the worm was written to spread to (and infect) the computers run by people who don’t take security seriously: It copies itself to other computers by trying to Remote Desktop into those computers using a list of what can only be described as completely moronic passwords (the full list is on Microsoft’s technical writeup about the worm). The repurcussions are that people (or companies) who use poor quality, easily guessed passwords have been (or are going to get) spanked by Morto, and then they’ll be really irritated at the (reversible but obnoxious) changes the worm makes to the behavior of the infected computer.

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