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0.4
 

Jumcar is the name we have given to a family of malicious code developed in Latin America particularly in Peru and which, according to our research, has been deploying attack maneuvers since March 2012.

After six months of research we can now detail the specific features of Jumcar. We will communicate these over the following days. Essentially the main purpose of the malware is stealing financial information from Latin American users who use the home-banking services of major banking companies. Of these, 90% are channeled in Peru through phishing strategies based on cloning the websites of six banks.

Some variants of the Jumcar family also target two banks in Chile, and another in Costa Rica.

Percentage of the phishing attacks by countries

Virus Watch|Malicious PACs and Bitcoins

Fabio Assolini
Kaspersky Lab Expert
Posted May 17, 13:58  GMT
Tags: Electronic Payments
0.2
 

Now cybercriminals from Brazil are also interested in Bitcoin currency. In order to join the horde of phishers on the lookout for the virtual currency they have applied their best malicious technique: malicious PAC on web attacks, and phishing domains.

The malicious usage of PAC (Proxy Auto-Config) among Brazilian black hats is not something new weve known about it since 2007. Generally, these kind of malicious scripts are used to redirect the victims connection to a phishing page of banks, credit cards and so on. We described these attacks in detail here. In 2012 a Russian Trojan banker called Capper also started using the same technique. When its used in drive-by-download attacks, it becomes very effective.

After registering the domain java7update.com, Brazilian criminals started attacking several websites, inserting a malicious iframe in some compromised pages:

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Microsoft released a long list of updates for Microsoft software today. The most interesting appear to be those patching Internet Explorer and the kernel software vulnerabilities. In all, ten critical "use-after-free" vulnerabilities are patched in IE along with one important Information Disclosure vulnerability, and three elevation of privilege vulnerabilities are being patched as well. Almost all of these IE vulnerabilities were reported by external security researchers working through HP's Zero Day Initiative.

The recent Internet Explorer 8 0day implemented with ROP to work across ASLR-protected Windows 7, hosted on the compromised Department of Labor website and others, was used as a part of a targeted attack watering hole campaign suggested to be run by known threat actor "DeepPanda". This IE 0day was reported by the guys over at FireEye and iSight Partners. It is being patched with Security Bulletin MS13-038. The others may not have been actively used by threat actors, but as always, it is very important for all Internet Explorer users to update these asap and avoid being a victim of the more common financially motivated mass-exploitation schemes.

A bit less sexy but very important for organizations to update are the three "Important" kernel escalation of privilege vulnerabilities. While these have not yet been known to be publicly exploited, EoP are actively deployed for post-exploitation purposes and are a significant part of any infiltration exercise. All three of these problems were reported by external security researchers, to whom Microsoft extended a "thanks".

Organizations should also be aware that Http.sys in Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows 2012 is vulnerable to denial of service attacks, but exploiting this bug appears to be very difficult. Accordingly, they are rating it "Important".

Other client side apps are being patched with "Important" rated updates as well, including Word, Publisher, and more. More information on all of these updates can be found over at Microsoft's summary.

Also today, Adobe's PSIRT pushed several important updates in ColdFusion (in the crosshairs for persistent attackers on organizations) and both of their big client side apps Flash and Reader/Acrobat.

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Virus Watch|Telecom fraud — phishing and Trojans combined

Dong Yan
Kaspersky Lab Expert
Posted May 13, 07:15  GMT
0.2
 

In China telecom fraud has become an increasingly common crime. Last year there were more than 170,000 telecom fraud cases, causing the loss of over $12.5 billion. The fraudsters usually call their victims and trick them into transferring cash to a criminal gang via an ATM. But recently a new breed of telecom fraud, which combines phishing sites and backdoor Trojans, has emerged.

Last week the police from the Dongcheng sub-branch of Beijing’s Public Security Bureau asked us to help investigate a telecom fraud case. The victim was defrauded of $100,000. After our investigation, the fraudsters’ tactics were laid bare.

So how does the scam work? How was the victim deceived?

First you get a call from a ‘public prosecutor’ saying that you are implicated in a financial crime and you must help with the investigation. Of course, you deny everything, but the ‘public prosecutor’ advises you to check if you are listed in an official database as a suspected criminal. To do this, they tell you to visit the “Supreme Procuratorate’s” website, which is, of course, a phishing site:

0.6
 

It has been three years since we published Lock, stock and two smoking Trojans in our blog. The article describes the first piece of malware designed to attack users of online banking software developed by a company called BIFIT. There are now several malicious programs with similar functionality, including:

  • Trojan-Spy.Win32.Lurk
  • Trojan-Banker.Win32.iBank
  • Trojan-Banker.Win32.Oris
  • Trojan-Spy.Win32.Carberp
  • Trojan-Banker.Win32.BifiBank
  • Trojan-Banker.Win32.BifitAgent

In spite of its functionality no longer being unique, the last program on the list caught our attention.


Words and strings used by Trojan-Banker.Win32.BifitAgent

This particular piece of malware has a number of features that set it apart from other similar programs.

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While researching PlugX propagation with the use of Java exploits we stumbled upon one compromised site that hosted and pushed a malicious Java applet exploiting the CVE 2013-0422 vulnerability. The very malicious Java application was detected heuristically with generic verdict for that vulnerability and it would have been hardly possible to spot that particular site between tons of other places where various malicious Java applications were detected with that generic verdict. But it was a very specific search conducted back then and this site appeared in statistics among not so many search results. Well, to be honest it was a false positive in terms of search criteria, but in this case it was a lucky mistake.

The infectious website was an Internet resource named - minjok.com and it turned out to be a news site in Korean and English languages covering mostly political events around the Korean peninsula. We notified an editor of this site about the compromise and although he has not responded, the site got closed after a while.

This is how minjok.com is described at http://www.northkoreatech.org/the-north-korean-website-list/minjok-tongshin/:


Description of minjok.com

Incidents|Boston Aftermath

Michael
Kaspersky Lab Expert
Posted April 17, 04:02  GMT
Tags: Malvertizing, Spam Letters, Social Engineering
0.3
 

While many are still in shock after the Boston Marathon bombings on 16 April, it didn't take long for cyber criminals to abuse that tragic incident for their dirty deeds.



Today we already started receiving emails containing links to malicious locations with names like "news.html". These pages contain URLs of non-malicious youtube clips covering the recent event. After a delay of 60 seconds, another link leading to an executable file is activated.



The malware, once running on an infected machine, tries to connect to several IP addresses in Ukraine, Argentina and Taiwan.
Kaspersky Lab detects this threat as "Trojan-PSW.Win32.Tepfer.*".

MD5sums of some of the collected samples:
5EA646FFDC1E9BC7759FDFC926DE7660
959E2DCAD471C86B4FDCF824A6A502DC

Our thoughts and prayers are with our colleagues in Massachusetts and others affected by the tragic events in Boston.

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Research|Winnti returns with PlugX

Dmitry Tarakanov
Kaspersky Lab Expert
Posted April 15, 12:30  GMT
0.6
 

Continuing our investigation into Winnti, in this post we describe how the group tried to re-infect a certain gaming company and what malware they used. After discovering that the company-s servers were infected, we began to clean them up in conjunction with the company-s system administrator, removing malicious files from the corporate network. This took a while because it was not clear at first exactly how the cybercriminals had penetrated the corporate network; we couldn-t find a way to completely stop attacks penetrating the network and malicious files kept appearing. An analysis performed by the gaming company itself led us to the conclusion that the infection started after establishing working contacts with a South Korean gaming company. This was also confirmed by our research: as we wrote before, the Winnti group is most active in East Asia and we identified 14 infected gaming companies in South Korea.

In the course of our efforts to remove the infection, the gaming company sent us suspicious files that were appearing on their computers. Many of these files were samples of Winnti malware. As soon as information about the malicious files was added to our antivirus databases, our products were used to remove Winnti malware from the gaming company-s corporate network. However, the attackers reacted very rapidly: new malware samples mysteriously appeared on computers from which the infection had been completely removed the previous day. Eventually, though, our efforts proved successful and further access to the gaming company-s computers was denied to the attackers.

However, just as we expected, it was too early to celebrate. Exactly one month after the gaming company-s network had been cleaned, the Winnti group returned. The system administrator sent us suspicious files, which had been attached to messages sent to company employees. This was run-of-the-mill spearphishing: the attackers introduced themselves as computer game developers and pretended to be looking for opportunities related to working with large publishers.

0.4
 

A new-ish Flash exploit has been on the loose for attacks around the web. This time, the attackers have compromised a caregiver site providing support for Tibetan refugee children and are spreading backdoors signed with Winnti stolen certificates delivered with Flash exploits - the compromised web site is the NGO "Tibetan Homes Foundation". Previously, FireEye identified similar "Lady Boyle" related malicious swf exploiting CVE-2013-0634. A notification has been sent to the contacts of the web site, but apparently the malicious footer.swf file is still hosted at the Foundation's web site, so please do not visit it just yet. Also, be sure to update your Flash player to the latest version.

This site certainly appears to be a classic example of a "watering hole" attack. F-Secure pointed out another Lady Boyle watering hole set up against a related Uyghur group, which has been targeted in tandem following the early March World Uyghur Congress. The delivered backdoors are shown to be signed with Winnti-stolen digital certificates in the F-Secure post, including the stolen MGAME certificate.

Here is an example of those same stolen certs reused for the backdoors in the Tibetan Homes Foundation incident. We see both the MGAME cert and the ShenZehn certs signing the backdoors, here are screenshots of the latter:

Our products detect the Flash exploit+payload as Exploit.SWF.CVE-2013-0634.a. Here is a heatmap of our worldwide detections. Note that not all of these detections are Lady Boyle related, I estimate that at least a third of them are:

Other sites hosting the Lady Boyle swf exploit over the past couple of months have included "tibetangeeks.com", who recently cleaned up their site and posted a cooperative plea to their attackers, and "vot.org" or the "Voice of Tibet" which is also cleaned up. Currently cleaned up but previously serving "Exploit.SWF.CVE-2013-0634.a" were Uyghur related sites "istiqlaltv.com" and "maarip.org", with the same "LadyBoyle" swf path as the Tibetan Homes Foundation, i.e.:
hxxp://maarip.org/uyghur/footer(.)swf

So, what we have is an active watering hole campaign implementing a fairly new Flash exploit and abusing digital certificates that were stolen as a part of the ongoing Winnti targeted attack campaigns on game developers and publishers.

Related md5:
BD9FD3E199C3DAB16CF8C9134E06FE12
215CEC7261D70A5913E79CD11EBC9ECC
12181311E049EB9F1B909EABFDB55427

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0.4
 

During our research on the Winnti group we discovered a considerable amount of Winnti samples targeting different gaming companies. Using this sophisticated malicious program cybercriminals gained remote access to infected workstations and then carried out further activity manually.

Naturally, we were keen to find out how the malicious libraries spread across a local network. To do so, we tracked the attackers- activity on an infected computer.

1st attempt: virtual machine #1

At the beginning of the investigation we ran the malicious programs on a virtual machine, which worked fairly well - we even spotted some cybercriminal activity. But they quickly realized it wasn-t a computer they wanted to net. Once that was the case, the attackers- servers stopped responding to requests from bots working on virtual machines.

This is what we managed to learn at this stage of our monitoring.

First of all, the perpetrators looked at what was happening on the victim-s desktop. After that they enabled the remote command line and used it to browse the root folder of the current disk, searched for the file winmm.dll, and checked the operating system version. The ListFileManager plugin then came into play. It works with the file system and the attackers used it to browse the folders C:\Windows and C:\Work. Then they tried to restart the computer, but made a mistake in the parameters of the ?shutdown command, having typed ?shutdown /t /r 1 (the computer should have been restarted in 1 second), but after a while they shut the computer down completely with the use of the correct command ?shutdown /s /t 1.