“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

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

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

Today Kaspersky Lab's team of experts published a detailed research report that analyzes a sustained cyberespionage campaign conducted by the cybercriminal organization known as Winnti.

According to report, the Winnti group has been attacking companies in the online video game industry since 2009 and is currently still active.

The group's objectives are stealing digital certificates signed by legitimate software vendors in addition to intellectual property theft, including the source code of online game projects.

The attackers' favorite tool is the malicious program we called "Winnti". It has evolved since its first use, but all variants can be divided into two generations: 1.x and 2.x. Our publication describes both variants of this tool.

In our report we publish an analysis of the first generation of Winnti.

The second generation (2.x) was used in one of the attacks which we investigated during its active stage, helping the victim to interrupt data transfer and isolate infections in the corporate network. The incidents, as well as results of our investigation, are described in the full report (PDF) on the Winnti group.

The Executive Summary is available here.

Is this research about a gaming Trojan from 2011? Why do you think it is significant?

This research is about a set of industrial cyberespionage campaigns and a criminal organization which massively penetrates many software companies and plays a very important role in the success of cyberespionage campaigns of other malicious actors.

It is important to be aware of this threat actor to understand the broader picture of cyberattacks coming from Asia. Having infected gaming companies that do business in the MMORPG space, the attackers potentially get access to millions of users. So far, we don't have data that the attackers stole from common users but we do have at least 2 incidents where the Winnti malware was planted on an online game update servers and these malicious executables were spread among a large number of the online gamers. The samples we observed seemed not to be malware targeting end user gamers, but a malware module which accidentally got into wrong place. Hoever, the potential for attackers to misuse such access to infect hundreds of millions of Internet users creates a major global risk.

It's important to understand that many gaming companies do business not only in gaming, but very often they are also developers or publishers of different other types of software. We have tracked an incident where a compromised company served an update of their software which included a Trojan from the Winnti hacking team. That became an infection vector to penetrate another company, which in turn led to a personal data leak of large number of its customers.

So far, this research is dedicated to a malicious group that not only undermines trust in fair gameplay but has a serious impact on trust in software vendors in general, especially in the regions where the Winnti group is active at the moment.

What are the malicious purposes of this Trojan?

The Trojan, or to be precise, a penetration kit called Winnti includes various modules to provide general purpose remote access to compromised machines. This includes general system information collection, file and process management, creating chains of network port redirection for convenient data exfiltration and remote desktop access.

Is this attack still active?

Yes, despite active steps to stop the attackers by the revocation of digital certificates, detection of the malware and an active investigation, the attackers remain active, with at least several victim companies around the world being actively compromised.

Over the last few months we have seen a series of very similar targeted attacks being blocked in our Linux Mail Security Product. In each case the documents used were RTF and the exploit was CVE-2012-0158 (MSCOMCTL.OCX RCE Vulnerability).

The attacks seem to be from the same group and most appear to be sent from Australia or Republic of Korea. The sender IP addresses vary but many are sent via mail.mailftast.com. This domain is registered in China:

REGISTRANT CONTACT INFO
liu runxin
No.1,Nanjing Road
Shanghai
Shanghai
200001
CN
Phone:         +86.2164415698
Email Address: lishd2011@163.com

The documents are in three categories:

1. The first group of documents are related to articles on the Men’s Health website. These are some example filenames:

   EAT FOR BETTER SEX.doc
   How to last longer in bed.doc
   6 Awkward Sex Moments, Defused.doc
   9 ways to have better,hotter,and more memorable sex.doc
   10 Ways to Get More Sex.doc

2. The second group are military related:

   Stealth Frigate.doc
   The BrahMos Missile.doc
   How DRDO failed India's military.doc

3. The third set have Cyrillic filenames:

   приоритеты сотрудничества.doc
   Список участников рабочей группы(0603-2013).doc
   Список кадров.doc
   Приглашение МИОМ ТЕЙКОВО 2013.doc

In the past, we've seen targeted attacks against Tibetan and Uyghur activists on Windows and Mac OS X platforms. We've documented several interesting attacks (A Gift for Dalai Lamas Birthday and Cyber Attacks Against Uyghur Mac OS X Users Intensify) which used ZIP files as well as DOC, XLS and PDF documents rigged with exploits.

Several days ago, the e-mail account of a high-profile Tibetan activist was hacked and used to send targeted attacks to other activists and human rights advocates. Perhaps the most interesting part is that the attack e-mails had an APK attachment - a malicious program for Android.

The attack

On March 24th, 2013, the e-mail account of a high-profile Tibetan activist was hacked and used to send spear phishing e-mails to their contact list. This is what the spear phishing e-mail looked like:

In regards to the message text above, multiple activist groups have recently organized a human rights conference event in Geneva. We've noticed an increase in the number of attacks using this event as a lure. Here's another example of such an attack hitting Windows users:

Going back to the Android Package (APK) file was attached to the e-mail, this is pushing an Android application named "WUC's Conference.apk".

This malicious APK is 334326 bytes file, MD5: 0b8806b38b52bebfe39ff585639e2ea2 and is detected by Kaspersky Lab products as "Backdoor.AndroidOS.Chuli.a".

After the installation, an application named "Conference" appears on the desktop:

If the victim launches this app, he will see text which "enlightens" the information about the upcoming event:

Earlier today, the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS Lab), together with the Hungarian National Security Authority (NBF), published details on a high profile targeted attack against Hungary. The details about the exact targets are not known and the incident remains classified.

Considering the implications of such an attack, Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research & Analysis Team performed a technical analysis of the campaign and related malware samples.

You can read our short FAQ below and you can download our technical analysis paper linked at the end of the blogpost.

Earlier today, reports of a number of cyberattacks against various South Korean targets hit the news.

The attackers, going by the handle “Whois Team” left a number of messages during the defacements:

On Feb 12th 2013, FireEye announced the discovery of an Adobe Reader 0-day exploit which is used to drop a previously unknown, advanced piece of malware. We called this new malware "ItaDuke" because it reminded us of Duqu and because of the ancient Italian comments in the shellcode copied from Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy".

Previously, we posted about another campaign hitting Governments and other institutions, named Miniduke, which was also using the same "Divine Comedy" PDF exploits.

In the meantime, we've come by other attacks which piggyback on the same high level exploit code, only this time the targets are different: Uyghur activists.

Together with our partner at AlienVault Labs, we analyzed these new exploits. For their blog, which includes Yara rules and industry standard IOC's, please read [here]. For our analysis, please read below.

The new attacks

A few days ago, we observed several PDF files which carry the CVE-2013-0640/641 (ItaDuke) exploits. Some of the MD5s and filenames include:

7005e9ee9f673edad5130b3341bf5e5f        2013-Yilliq Noruz Bayram Merik isige Teklip.pdf
d00e4ac94f1e4ff67e0e0dfcf900c1a8        ÁLÃûÐÅ.pdf (joint_letter.pdf)
ad668992e15806812dd9a1514cfc065b        arp.pdf

The Kaspersky detection name for these exploits is Exploit.JS.Pdfka.gjc.

(or, how many cool words can you fit into one title)

On Feb 12th 2013, FireEye announced the discovery of an Adobe Reader 0-day exploit which is used to drop a previously unknown, advanced piece of malware. We called this new malware "ItaDuke" because it reminded us of Duqu and because of the ancient Italian comments in the shellcode copied from Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy".

Since the original announcement, we have observed several new attacks using the same exploit (CVE-2013-0640) which drop other malware. Between these, we've observed a couple of incidents which are so unusual in many ways that we-ve decided to analyse them in depth.

Together with our partner CrySyS Lab, we've performed a detailed analysis of these unusual incidents which suggest a new, previously unknown threat actor. For the CrySyS Lab analysis, please read [here]. For our analysis, please read below.

Key findings include:

• The MiniDuke attackers are still active at this time and have created malware as recently as February 20, 2013. To compromise the victims, the attackers used extremely effective social engineering techniques which involved sending malicious PDF documents to their targets. The PDFs were highly relevant and well-crafted content that fabricated human rights seminar information (ASEM) and Ukraine-s foreign policy and NATO membership plans.

These malicious PDF files were rigged with exploits attacking Adobe Reader versions 9, 10 and 11, bypassing its sandbox.

• Once the system is exploited, a very small downloader is dropped onto the victim-s disc that-s only 20KB in size. This downloader is unique per system and contains a customized backdoor written in Assembler. When loaded at system boot, the downloader uses a set of mathematical calculations to determine the computer-s unique fingerprint, and in turn uses this data to uniquely encrypt its communications later.

• If the target system meets the pre-defined requirements, the malware will use Twitter (unbeknownst to the user) and start looking for specific tweets from pre-made accounts. These accounts were created by MiniDuke-s Command and Control (C2) operators and the tweets maintain specific tags labeling encrypted URLs for the backdoors.

These URLs provide access to the C2s, which then provide potential commands and encrypted transfers of additional backdoors onto the system via GIF files.

• Based on the analysis, it appears that the MiniDuke-s creators provide a dynamic backup system that also can fly under the radar - if Twitter isn-t working or the accounts are down, the malware can use Google Search to find the encrypted strings to the next C2. This model is flexible and enables the operators to constantly change how their backdoors retrieve further commands or malcode as needed.

• Once the infected system locates the C2, it receives encrypted backdoors that are obfuscated within GIF files and disguised as pictures that appear on a victim-s machine.

Once they are downloaded to the machine, they can fetch a larger backdoor which carries out the cyberespionage activities, through functions such as copy file, move file, remove file, make directory, kill process and of course, download and execute new malware and lateral movement tools.

• The final stage backdoor connects to two servers, one in Panama and one in Turkey to receive the instructions from the attackers.

• The attackers left a small clue in the code, in the form of the number 666 (0x29A hex) before one of the decryption subroutines:

• By analysing the logs from the command servers, we have observed 59 unique victims in 23 countries:

Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States.

For the detailed analysis and information on how to protect against the attack, please read:

[The MiniDuke Mystery: PDF 0-day Government Spy Assembler 0x29A Micro Backdoor.PDF]