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.

After the recent emergence of the criminal PiceBOT in Latin America, AlbaBotnet has joined the growing ranks of regional IT crime. It revolves around online pharming, with a view to delivering targeted phishing attacks which steal information from the online accounts of two major Chilean banks.

According to the data we have processed, this campaign is part of a trial stage of this botnet: up to now there has been no monetization of AlbaBotnet. We do know that the author of this threat began testing it in early 2012.

The botnet appears to have a similar structure to its Latin American counterparts. As well as the default automated malware builder, it includes a package which automatically sends emails. Thus, the botmaster can customize infection campaigns through the classic mechanisms of visual social engineering:

What do you see here?

A free AV product protecting a Windows XP machine, right?

Following in the wake of the vOlk (Mexico) and S.A.P.Z. (Peru) botnets comes PiceBOT, a newbie to the Latin American cybercrime scene. The cost on the black market is currently around $140.

Like other crimeware of its kind, its main purpose is the distribution of malware that steals financial information through local pharming attacks (arbitrary modification of a hosts file). Despite its recent onset (less than a month) it has already been adopted by Latin American cybercriminals to target clients of major banks. So far we have recorded phishing attacks generated and managed through this botnet in Chile, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Argentina. The following image, obtained from an underground forum, shows some examples:

In China these days, e-commerce has become an important part of daily life, especially among young people. According to a report from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), the number of Chinese e-commerce users reached 242 million at the end of the December 2012. This is nearly half of all Chinese internet users.

Because of this, many Chinese cyber-criminals changed their business from stealing QQ numbers or virtual assets in online games to stealing money during the online trading. In October, People-s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, reported that a group of cybercriminals were arrested in connection with a Trojan targeting the e-commerce users. The Trojan, detected by Kaspersky Lab as trojan-Banker.Win32.Bancyn.a, was named -Floating Cloud-, and was used to steal several millions of dollars from e-commerce users.

The name -Floating Cloud-, -浮云- in Chinese, comes from a very popular saying among Chinese internet users -神马都是浮云-. The direct translation is -God horses are always floating clouds-, which means everything flows away in haste like floating clouds. But here, the floating cloud is not a God horse but a Trojan horse. And the -Floating Cloud- was written in EAZY programming language in which programs can be written totally in Chinese.

To distribute the Trojan, cyber-criminals often masquerade as sellers. When the customer/target asks for information about the merchandise, they send a zip archive with the names like -detail information- which purports to contain a few pictures depicting the merchandise. But among these pictures, there is an executable file with the icon of image files. If the customer wants to take a look at this -picture- file and double clicks it, the Trojan will run.

We previously wrote several times about Man-in-the-Mobile attacks which aim to steal mTANs sent via SMS. For a long time, only two families of such malware have been known: ZeuS-in-the-Mobile (ZitMo) and SpyEye-in-the-Mobile (SpitMo). ZitMo and SpitMo work together with their Windows ‘brothers’. Actually, without them, they would look like trivial SMS spy Trojans. It is necessary to mention that during the last two years such attacks have been observed only in some European countries like Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland and few others.

But when the mobile version of Carberp Trojan appeared (we detect it as Trojan-Spy.AndroidOS.Citmo, Carberp-in-the-Mobile) such attacks became real in Russia as well. There is no secret that online banking is becoming more and more popular in Russia; and banks are very active in promoting online banking with various authorization methods.

Carberp for Windows works in a similar way to the ZeuS Trojan. If a user tries to login into his online banking account using a machine infected by Carberp, the malware will modify the transaction so that user credentials are sent to a malicious server rather than a bank server.

In addition to the login and password, cybercriminals still need mTANs in order to confirm any money transfer operation from a stolen account. That is why one of the Carberp modifications (we call it Trojan-Spy.Win32.Carberp.ugu and we've added detection for it on 11th of December) alters the online banking web page on the fly, inviting the user to download and install an application which is allegedly necessary for logging into the system. And the user can get this link via SMS message by entering his phone number or by scanning a QR-code:

According to this screenshot, users of one of the most popular Russian banks, Sberbank, are under attack. ‘Sberbank’ updated its web page on 12th of December with information about the attack. The link in the QR-code led to the fake ‘SberSafe’ application (Trojan-Spy.AndroidOS.Citmo) which has been in Google Play since 30th of November.

Right after the Venezuelan presidential elections cybercriminals launched a new credential stealing malware joined by a social engineering campaign saying that supposedly the last election was a fraud. The name of the malicious file is “listas-fraude-electoral.pdf.exe” which is translates to “Fraud elections lists” and it spread via a fake Globovision Venezuelan news TV station.

The mentioned malware is quite simple and it sets out to disable the UAC system, which allows the criminals to run administrative commands under restricted users accounts.

C:\Windows\System32\reg.exe ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

How easy is it for bad guys to buy valid digital certificates from CAs using fake data and then start signing Trojan bankers with them? In Brazil it appears to be very easy.

Today most software developers digitally sign their programs. The process involves Certification Authorities (CAs) that must verify the authenticity of the files and issue a certificate to the developers.

As we know, valid or stolen digital certificates are used by some malware authors to create files that can go undetected for some time and be recognized as legitimate. Now Brazilian cybercriminals have started using this technique in their malware in an attempt to gain more time to spread files undetected. Recently we found a Trojan banker signed with a valid digital certificate issued by a CA. It appears that fake company data was used to obtain the certificate.

How easy is it for a CA to check if the data they receive is legitimate or not? Brazilian cybercriminals registered a domain called gastecnology.org, copying the name of a well-known and trusted local software company. This is the data used to register the domain:

Introduction

Gauss is the most recent cyber-surveillance operation in the Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame saga.

It was probably created in mid-2011 and deployed for the first time in August-September 2011.

Gauss was discovered during the course of the ongoing effort initiated by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), following the discovery of Flame. The effort is aimed at mitigating the risks posed by cyber-weapons, which is a key component in achieving the overall objective of global cyber-peace.

In 140 chars or less, “Gauss is a nation state sponsored banking Trojan which carries a warhead of unknown designation”. Besides stealing various kinds of data from infected Windows machines, it also includes an unknown, encrypted payload which is activated on certain specific system configurations.

Just like Duqu was based on the “Tilded” platform on which Stuxnet was developed, Gauss is based on the “Flame” platform. It shares some functionalities with Flame, such as the USB infection subroutines.

In this FAQ, we answer some of the main questions about this operation. In addition to this, we are also releasing a full technical paper (HTML version and PDF version) about the malware’s functionalities.

What is Gauss? Where does the name come from?

Gauss is a complex cyber-espionage toolkit created by the same actors behind the Flame malware platform. It is highly modular and supports new functions which can be deployed remotely by the operators in the form of plugins. The currently known plugins perform the following functions:

• Intercept browser cookies and passwords.
• Harvest and send system configuration data to attackers.
• Infect USB sticks with a data stealing module.
• List the content of the system drives and folders
• Steal credentials for various banking systems in the Middle East.
• Hijack account information for social network, email and IM accounts.

The modules have internal names which appear to pay tribute to famous mathematicians and philosophers, such as Kurt Godel, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss and Joseph-Louis Lagrange.

The module named “Gauss” is the most important in the malware as it implements the data stealing capabilities and we have therefore named the malware toolkit by this most important component.

Gauss Architecture

In addition, the authors forgot to remove debugging information from some of the Gauss samples, which contain the paths where the project resides. The paths are:

One immediately notices “projects\gauss”.

In regards to the “white” part - we believe this is a reference to Lebanon, the country with the most Gauss infections. According to Wikipedia, “The name Lebanon comes from the Semitic root LBN, meaning "white", likely a reference to the snow-capped Mount Lebanon.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanon#Etymology

=== Not really, especially in Latin America. Every day we register lots of similar attacks, each abusing local DNS settings. Actually these attacks are a bit different because they modify the local HOST file but the principle is the same – redirecting the victim to a malicious host via malicious DNS records.

Latin American cybercriminals are used to recycling old techniques used elsewhere in the past and what is happening right now is a growth of attacks abusing local DNS settings. The latest social engineering-based malware attack in Mexico – which imitated the Mexican tax office – is a recent example of this.