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

Last week, Adobe released a patch for a vulnerability in Flash Player that was being exploited in targeted attacks.

Before reading any further, we recommend you to take a moment make sure you apply this patch. Adobe offers this nifty tool to check that you have the latest version of Flash Player.

If you are running Google Chrome, make sure you have version -24.0.1312.57 m- or later.

Now back to CVE-2013-0633, the critical vulnerability that was discovered and reported to Adobe by Kaspersky Lab researchers Sergey Golovanov and Alexander Polyakov. The exploits for CVE-2013-0633 have been observed while monitoring the so-called -legal- surveillance malware created by the Italian company HackingTeam. In this blog, we will describe some of the attacks and the usage of this 0-day to deploy malware from -HackingTeam- marketed as Remote Control System.

The Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Incubator program updated their Flash Platform runtime beta program to version 5, delivered as Flash Player version 11.2.300.130. It includes a "sandboxed" version of the 32-bit Flash Player they are calling "Protected Mode for Mozilla Firefox on Windows 7 and Windows Vista systems". It has been over a year since Adobe discussed the Internet Explorer ActiveX Protected Mode version release on their ASSET blog, and the version running on Google Chrome was sandboxed too.

Adobe is building on the successes that they have seen in their Adobe Reader X software. Its sandbox technology has substantially raised the bar for driving up the costs of "offensive research", resulting in a dearth of Itw exploits on Reader X. As in "none" in 2011. This trend reflects 2011 targeted attack activity that we’ve observed. 2011 APT related attacks nailed outdated versions of Adobe Flash software delivered as "authplay.dll" in Adobe Reader v8.x and v9.x and the general Flash component "NPSWF32.dll" used by older versions of Microsoft Office and other applications. Adobe X just wasn't hit. IE Protected Mode wasn't hit. Chrome sandboxed Flash wasn't hit. If there are incident handlers out there that saw a different story, please let me know.

The Democratic Party of Hong Kong's website was compromised and malware uploaded to the web server. Interestingly, the server was distributing malicious flash and spyware nearly identical to the compromised UK Amnesty International servers at the beginning of this month. The server is being cleaned up.

The english version of the website did not include injected iframe links pointing to the exploit.html page, which in turn delivers three different version-appropriate malicious variants of flash detected by Kaspersky as "Exploit.SWF.CVE-2011-0611". The malicious flash was 0day at the beginning of this month, and will be effective on unpatched systems.

Adobe released its fix for CVE-2011-0609 this afternoon, making good on last week's advisory dealing with the latest Flash zero-day. Kaspersky Lab products detected the variants as "Trojan-Dropper.MSExcel.SWFDrop" this past week.

While we questioned the usefulness of Flash functionality within Excel spreadsheet cells last week, attackers were sending out emails containing just these sorts of files. Our Kaspersky Security Network statistics saw very low numbers spread out across the globe, revealing attackers making targeted use of this zero-day attack.

This week it’s Twitter’s turn to host an attack - one that is targeting both Twitter users and the Internet community at large. In this case it's a malicious Twitter profile twitter.com/[skip]/ with a name that is Portuguese for ‘pretty rabbit’ which has a photo advertising a video with girls posted.

This profile has obviously been created especially for infecting users, as there is no other data except the photo, which contains the link to the video.

If you click on the link, you get a window that shows the progress of an automatic download of a so-called new version of Adobe Flash which is supposedly required to watch the video. You end up with a file labeled Adobe Flash (it’s a fake) on your machine; a technique that is currently very popular.

We have discovered one interesting technique to hide malicious code from researchers.

The initial infection was common iframe injection on a web page. The iframe page loaded tiny shockwave file, which was only 158 bytes long!

This file uses internal ActionScript global variable ("$version") to get the version of user's OS and plugin for handling Shockwave files.