HSBC customers, watch what you execute on your PCs. A circulating malicious spam campaign attempts to socially engineer you into thinking that you’ve received a legitimate ‘payment e-Advice’. In reality, once you execute the attachment, your PC automatically joins the botnet operated by the cybercriminal(s) behind the campaign.
We’ve just intercepted a currently circulating malicious spam campaign impersonating WhatsApp — yet again — in an attempt to trick its users into thinking that they’ve received a voice mail. Once socially engineered users execute the malicious attachment found in the fake emails, their PCs automatically join the botnet operated by the cybercriminal(s) behind the campaign.
In need of a good reason to immediately improve the strength of your Origin password, in case you don’t want to lose access to your inventory of games, as well as your gaming reputation? We’re about to give you a pretty good one. A newly released proxy-supporting Origin brute-forcing tool is not just efficiency verifying an end user’s understanding of basic security practices, but also, has built-in option for parsing an affected user’s inventory of games, as well as related gaming information. Why would a cybercriminal want to gain access to someone’s gaming account in the first place, besides the most logical reason of gaining access to their gaming inventory? Simple. To set up the foundations for a successful business model relying on standardized E-shops for selling access to compromised gaming/accounting data.
Want to file for mileage reimbursement through a STD-261 form? You may want to skip the tens of thousands of malicious emails currently in circulation, attempting to trick users into executing the malicious attachment. Once downloaded, your PC automatically joins the botnet operated by the cybercriminal(s) behind the campaign, undermining the confidentiality and integrity of the host.
Cybercriminals are currently mass mailing tens of thousands of malicious emails, supposedly including a photo attachment that’s been “Sent from an iPhone”. The social engineering driven spam campaign is, however, the latest attempt by a cybercriminal/group of cybercriminals that we’ve been monitor for a while, to attempt to trick gullible users into unknowingly joining the botnet operated by the malicious actor(s) behind the campaign.
Telephony Denial of Service Attacks (TDoS) continue representing a growing market segment within the Russian/Eastern European underground market, with more vendors populating it with propositions for products and services aiming to disrupt the phone communications of prospective victims. From purely malicious in-house infrastructure — dozens of USB hubs with 3G USB modems using fraudulently obtained, non-attributable SIM cards — abuse of legitimate infrastructure, like Skype, ICQ, a mobile carrier’s legitimate service functionality, or compromised accounts of SIP account owners, the market continues growing to the point where even Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) providers start ‘vertically integrating’.
A new, commercially available multi-threaded SIP-based TDoS tool released by what appears to be an experienced TDoS vendor that’s also offering managed TDoS services, is prone to empower not just lone attackers, but also, potential new vendors who’d use the tool as a primarily vehicle for the the future growth of their business model. Let’s profile the tool, discuss its features, as well as what might have prompted the vendor of managed TDoS services to start selling copies of it, instead of exclusively using it in-house.
Sharing is caring. In this post, I’ll put the spotlight on a currently circulating, massive — thousands of sites affected — malicious iframe campaign, that attempts to drop malicious software on the hosts of unaware Web site visitors through a cocktail of client-side exploits. The campaign, featuring a variety of evasive tactics making it harder to analyze, continues to efficiently pop up on thousands of legitimate Web sites. Ultimately hijacking the legitimate traffic hitting them and successfully undermining the confidentiality and integrity of the affected users’ hosts.
Our sensors just picked up an interesting Web site infection that’s primarily targeting Brazilian users. It appears that the Web site of the Brazilian Jaqueira prefecture has been compromised, and is exposing users to a localized (to Portuguese) Web page enticing them into installing a malicious version of Adobe’s Flash player. Not surprisingly, we’ve also managed to identify approximately 63 more Brazilian Web sites that are victims to the same infection.
A typical campaign attempting to trick users into installing Potentially Unwanted Software (PUA), would usually consist of a single social engineering vector, which on the majority of cases would represent something in the lines of a catchy “Play Now/Missing Video Plugin” type of advertisement. Not the one we’ll discuss in this blog post. Relying on deceptive “visual social engineering” practices, a popular French torrent portal is knowingly — the actual directory structure explicitly says /fakeplayer — enticing users into installing the BubbleDock/Downware/DownloadWare PUA. What kind of social engineering tactics is the portal relying on? Let’s find out.
We’ve intercepted a currently trending malicious iframe campaign, affecting hundreds of legitimate Web sites, that’s interestingly part of the very same infrastructure from May, 2013’s analysis of the compromise of an Indian government Web site. The good news? Not only have we got you proactively covered, but also, the iframe domain is currently redirecting to a client-side exploit serving URL that’s offline. Let’s provide some actionable intelligence on the malicious activity that is known to have originated from the same iframe campaign in the past month, indicating that the cybercriminal(s) behind it are actively multi-tasking on multiple fronts.
In a professional cybercrime ecosystem, largely resembling that of a legitimate economy, market participants constantly strive to optimize their campaigns, achieve stolen assets liquidity, and most importantly, aim to reach a degree of efficiency that would help them gain market share. Thus, help them secure multiple revenue streams. Despite the increased transparency on the Russian/Easter European underground market — largely thanks to improved social networking courtesy of the reputation-aware cybercriminals wanting to establish themselves as serious vendors — certain newly joining vendors continue being a victim of their market-irrelevant ‘biased exclusiveness’ in terms of the unique value propositon (UVP) presented to the community members. Moreover, in combination with the over-supply of DIY malware/botnet generating tools, next to the release of leaked/cracked source code, positions them in a situation where they can no longer command the high prices for their products/service, like they once did. That’s mainly because the competition is so fierce, that it inevitably results in the commodinitization of these underground market items.
What happens when this commoditization takes place? What are cybercriminals doing with the leaked/cracked source code for sophisticated malware/botnet generating tools? Why would a cybercriminal purposely offer the source code of his malware ‘release’ for sale, especially given that he can continue enjoying its proprietary nature, meaning, a supposedly lower detection rate? Let’s discuss these scenarios through the prism of a recently offered source code of a proprietary spam bot written in Delphi. The bot relies primarily on compromised/automatically registered email accounts as the primary propagation vector for upcoming (malicious) spam campaigns.
In a series of blog posts, we’ve highlighted the emergence of easy to use, publicly obtainable, cracked or leaked, DIY (Do It Yourself) DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack tools. These services empower novice cybercriminals with easy to use tools, enabling them to monetize in the form of ‘vendor’ type propositions for DDoS for hire services. Not surprisingly, we continue to observe the growth of this emerging (international) market segment, with its participants continuing to professionalize, while pitching their services to virtually anyone who’s willing to pay for them. However, among the most common differences between the international underground marketplace and, for instance, the Russian/Easter European one, remain the OPSEC (Operational Security) applied — if any — by the market participants knowingly or unknowingly realizing its potential as key differentiation factor for their own market propositions.
Case in point, yet another newly launched DDoS for hire service, that despite the fact that it’s pitching itself as anonymity and privacy aware, is failing to differentiate its unique value proposition (UVP) in terms of OPSEC.
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