Threat Lab

Girl Scouts and OpenText empower future leaders of tomorrow with cyber resilience

The transition to a digital-first world enables us to connect, work and live in a realm where information is available at our fingertips. The children of today will be working in an environment of tomorrow that is shaped by hyperconnectivity. Operating in this...

World Backup Day reminds us all just how precious our data is

Think of all the important files sitting on your computer right now. If your computer crashed tomorrow, would you be able to retrieve your important files? Would your business suffer as a result? As more and more of our daily activities incorporate digital and online...

3 Reasons We Forget Small & Midsized Businesses are Major Targets for Ransomware

The ransomware attacks that make headlines and steer conversations among cybersecurity professionals usually involve major ransoms, huge corporations and notorious hacking groups. Kia Motors, Accenture, Acer, JBS…these companies were some of the largest to be...

How Ransomware Sneaks In

Ransomware has officially made the mainstream. Dramatic headlines announce the latest attacks and news outlets highlight the staggeringly high ransoms businesses pay to retrieve their stolen data. And it’s no wonder why – ransomware attacks are on the rise and the...

An MSP and SMB guide to disaster preparation, recovery and remediation

Introduction It’s important for a business to be prepared with an exercised business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan plan before its hit with ransomware so that it can resume operations as quickly as possible. Key steps and solutions should be followed...

Podcast: Cyber resilience in a remote work world

The global pandemic that began to send us packing from our offices in March of last year upended our established way of working overnight. We’re still feeling the effects. Many office workers have yet to return to the office in the volumes they worked in pre-pandemic....

5 Tips to get Better Efficacy out of Your IT Security Stack

If you’re an admin, service provider, security executive, or are otherwise affiliated with the world of IT solutions, then you know that one of the biggest challenges to overcome is efficacy. Especially in terms of cybersecurity, efficacy is something of an amorphous...

How Cryptocurrency and Cybercrime Trends Influence One Another

Typically, when cryptocurrency values change, one would expect to see changes in crypto-related cybercrime. In particular, trends in Bitcoin values tend to be the bellwether you can use to predict how other currencies’ values will shift, and there are usually...

In space, no one can hear you hack

Nov 14, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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.

This blackhole exploit kit gives you Windows Media Player and a whole lot more

Nov 11, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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.

Will you take Facebook’s candy?

Nov 9, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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.

Take This Lollipop, 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?

I don’t think it means what you think it means…

Nov 4, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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…

Outdated Operating System? This BlackHole Exploit Kit has you in its sights

Oct 31, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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.

Awake at all hours during Cyber Security Awareness Month

Oct 25, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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.

A look inside the SpyEye Trojan admin console

Oct 24, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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.

HTC acknowledges security flaw, plans update to fix

Oct 5, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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

Mebromi: the first BIOS rootkit in the wild

Sep 13, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

By Marco Giuliani

In the past few weeks a Chinese security company called Qihoo 360 blogged about a new BIOS rootkit hitting Chinese computers. This turned to be a very interesting discovery as it appears to be the first real malware targeting system BIOS since a well-known proof of concept called IceLord in 2007. The malware is called Mebromi and contains a bit of everything: a BIOS rootkit specifically targeting Award BIOS, a MBR rootkit, a kernel mode rootkit, a PE file infector and a Trojan downloader. At this time, Mebromi is not designed to infect 64-bit operating system and it is not able to infect the system if run with limited privileges.

The infection starts with a small encrypted dropper that contains five crypted resource files: hook.rom, flash.dll, cbrom.exe, my.sys, bios.sys. The goal of these files will be presented later in this analysis.

The infection is clearly focused on Chinese users, because the dropper is carefully checking if the system it’s going to infect is protected by Chinese security software Rising Antivirus and Jiangmin KV Antivirus. To gain access to the BIOS, the infection first needs to get loaded in kernel mode so that it can handle with physical memory instead of virtual memory.

Many of you may recall the old CIH/Chernobyl infection, the infamous virus discovered in 1998 that was able to flash the motherboard BIOS, erasing it. Even CIH needed to gain kernel mode access to reach the BIOS, though at the time the virus was exploiting a privilege escalation bug in Windows 9x operating system which allowed it to overwrite the Interrupt Descriptor Table with its own payload from user mode, then triggering the overwritten interrupt handler and its malicious code is executed in kernel mode. Mebromi does not use such kind of privilege escalation trick anymore, it just needs to load its own kernel mode driver which will handle the BIOS infection. To do so, it uses two methods: it could either extract and load the flash.dll library which will load the bios.sys driver, or it stops the beep.sys service key, overwriting the beep.sys driver with its own bios.sys code, restart the service key and restore the original beep.sys code.

The bios.sys driver is the code which handle the BIOS infection. To read the BIOS code, it needs to map the physical memory located at physical memory address 0xF0000, this is where the BIOS ROM usually resides. Once read, the driver verifies if the BIOS ROM is Award BIOS, by checking the presence of the string: $@AWDFLA. If found, the driver tries to locate the SMI port that will be used by the rootkit to flash the BIOS ROM.

If the BIOS ROM matches the string, the rootkit saves a copy of the BIOS to the file C:bios.bin and pass the next step to the user mode component of the infection. The dropper extracts two files: cbrom.exe and hook.rom. Cbrom.exe is a legitimate tool developed by Phoenix Technologies, used to modify the Award/Phoenix BIOS ROM binaries. Hook.rom is the rootkit ISA BIOS ROM that is added to the BIOS binary, containing the rootkit infection. The dropper executes cbrom.exe with the /isa switch parameter, passing the hook.rom file. Before actually injecting the malicious ISA ROM, the dropper checks the BIOS ROM code looking for the “hook rom” string, used as a marker of the infection. If found, it means that the BIOS is already infected and it doesn’t need to be infected again.

After that the bios.bin file has been modified, the bios.sys driver send to the BIOS SMI port the command 0x29, used to erase the BIOS flash, and then the command 0x2F used to write the new BIOS ROM code to the BIOS ROM.

The BIOS is now infected, and the dropper goes to its next step: infecting the Master Boot Record. The infection is 14 sectors long and the original MBR is stored to the sector 7. To avoid potential startup issues, the infected MBR stores a copy of the original MBR’s partition table. Finally the dropper extracts the my.sys driver on the root of the C: drive. My.sys is a kernel mode rootkit that hijacks disk.sys’s IRP major functions, by redirecting the IRP_MJ_READ/WRITE and IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL native functions. It is used to hide the infection on the disk. Even if the BIOS infection doesn’t succeed, the rootkit does infect the MBR.

At the next system startup, after the BIOS POST phase, the malicious code injected inside it prepares the full MBR infection (all the first 14 sectors are stored inside the malicious BIOS rom, 7168 bytes in total) and checks the MBR code of the hard drive looking if the infection is already present. To do it, the BIOS malicious code checks for the presence of the string “int1” at the offset 0x92. If the string is not found, the BIOS malicious rom will overwrite all the first 14 sectors of the hard drive, thus restoring the MBR infection.

The system startup procedure continues and the control now passes to the malicious master boot record. Here the malicious payload analyzes the original MBR partition table and looks for the active partition, checking if it’s using a NTFS or FAT32 file system. The malicious MBR code contains indeed NTFS/FAT32 parser routines, used to get inside the file system to look for winlogon.exe or wininit.exe file. When found, the malicious code contains a file infection payload, able to inject malicious code inside the specified file and hijack the entry point of it. Before infecting the file, the MBR malicious code checks if it is already infected, by looking for the string “cnns” at the offset 0x50 from the beginning of the PE file. This is the infection marker. If the string is not found, the infection stores a crypted payload – about 600 bytes of code – inside winlogon.exe or wininit.exe and hijacks the PE entry point to the beginning of it, saving the original entry point at the offset 0x60.

The job of the MBR infection ends here, waiting for the Windows startup which will load the patched executable. When loaded, the payload self-decrypt its malicious code and loads in memory the my.sys driver. Then it tries to download an additional infection from the (now unavailable) URL address: http://dh.3515.info:806/test/91/calc[removed].

The concept behind Mebromi is not new. In fact we must recall the IceLord BIOS rootkit published in 2007, a public proof of concept able to target Award BIOS rom, using an approach very similar to the Mebromi one – or should we say that Mebromi is more than just inspired by the IceLord rootkit?

Storing the malicious code inside the BIOS ROM could actually become more than just a problem for security software, giving the fact that even if an antivirus detect and clean the MBR infection, it will be restored at the next system startup when the malicious BIOS payload would overwrite the MBR code again. Developing an antivirus utility able to clean the BIOS code is a challenge, because it needs to be totally error-proof, to avoid rendering the system unbootable at all. The job of handling with such specific system codes should be left to the developers of the specific motherboard model, who release BIOS updates along with specific tool to update the BIOS code.

On the other hand, although this kind of infection is potentially one of the most persistent infections known out there in the wild, it will hardly become a major threat because of the level of complexity needed to achieve the goal. While a kernel mode infection or a MBR infection could still work in a generic way among all the PC out there – and they still have a huge available free space to play with, a BIOS-based rootkit needs to be fully compatible with all major BIOS rom out there, it should be able to infect all the different releases of Award, Phoenix, AMI BIOS’s out there; a level of complexity that is simply unasked for writing a good persistent infection (e.g. TDL rootkit, various Rustock releases, ZeroAccess rootkit among all). In fact, why is Mebromi only targetting Award BIOS rom? Perhaps because there was already a known proof of concept that is 5 years old targeting Award BIOS ROM available online.

Are BIOS rootkits a real threat? Yes, we can consider Mebromi the first real BIOS rootkit incident discovered in the wild – let’s consider IceLord BIOS rootkit more a proof of concept. Should we be concerned about BIOS rootkits? Well, while we try to discover whether our PC is infected by an unknown and super-stealth BIOS rootkit, let’s try and look if there is a more “humble” kernel mode rootkit which is already infecting our PC, allowing a remote attacker to silently own our system.

Morto Worm Annoyances Outstrip Functionality

Aug 31, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

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.

Trojans Employ Misdirection Instead of Obfuscation

Aug 25, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

An unusual family of Trojans, apparently of Chinese origin, engages in rootkit-like behavior which seems designed not to hide the presence of the malware on an infected system, but to misdirect or confuse a technical person who might be using system analysis tools on an infected computer.

The Trojans all originated from a server operated by a free Web host in China, and each sample we tested sent profiling data about the infected system to a command-and-control server located on yet another free Web host, also located in China. It appears to have capabilities to receive instructions to download other components, and it scans the system for antivirus products commonly available in China, including products made by Qihoo 360, China’s largest homegrown antivirus company.

But the most interesting aspect of the Trojans was how it managed to fool most of the free tools someone might use to monitor running programs. The Trojan shows up in the list of active programs, but when that list includes a full path to the running executable, that path points at a nonexistent file supposedly in another location. read more…

Black Hat Redux: Botnet Takedown Mistakes to Avoid

Aug 17, 2011 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

FireEye’s Lanstein and Wolf speak at Black Hat

I’ve worked in the security industry for nearly five years, and it was apparent early on that the most successful people in this field bring to their work a passion and a commitment to protecting not only one’s customers, but to providing a certain level of information about security threats to the world at-large, so even your non-customers can help or protect themselves.

It can be hard to know where to stop once you get on a roll. Malware infections frequently lead to unexplored, interesting backwaters on the Internet. And, sometimes, those backwaters are where the criminals run those operations. When I stumble upon a criminal network or a botnet controller, it simply doesn’t feel like I’ve done enough when I merely add signatures which block or remediate infections and communications with a command-and-control server from Webroot customers. If malicious behavior depends on one or more Internet sites that send instructions, my (and many others’) initial reaction is we need to shut that down, permanently. But sometimes, a too-rapid reaction can blow back in your face.

Obviously, that was also the case when Alex Lanstein and Julia Wolf of internet security firm FireEye stumbled upon the Rustock botnet. At one time, before law enforcement in several countries swooped in on the data centers hosting the botnet’s command-and-control (CnC) infrastructure in a coordinated raid earlier this year, the massive network of Rustock-infected computers was responsible for about half of spam flooding the ‘net. The researchers’ instincts to engineer a takedown of the botnet sounded very familiar, but their initial attempts to do so backfired, and may have even spurred the malware developers to change their game, and may have made it more difficult, eventually, to eliminate the CnC altogether.