Kaspersky Security Network is an integral part of Kaspersky Lab technology. With its ‘cloud’ architecture KSN automatically detects and blocks unknown malware and infected/dangerous websites, filters spam, protects children from unwanted content and lots more. Our aim is for users to always have as full a picture as possible of the current threat landscape around the world. That’s why we have come up with the Irida screensaver. It displays statistics about the latest threats that have been detected and blocked using KSN and is updated every 12 hours.

Install our screensaver and discover the full potential of Kaspersky Security Network! Download at: http://irida.kasperskyclub.com/scr.zip

We all know that cybercriminals will target anything and everything they can reach. And at Kaspersky, we also know that a lot of IT admins don’t look after their Internet resources. Sad but true – ask an admin if their servers are protected, and you’ll often get the answer, “Oh, come on, who needs my SQL server?”

A few months ago we set up a new honeypot (http://www.mwcollect.org) in our Japanese research centre in Tokyo. The honeypot is mainly used to collect malicious Windows executables, which it does pretty well by emulating shellcode when it finds network exploits. A side effect of using the honeypot to listen on all ports is that we get statistics (as well as unexpected data) coming in on various network ports of the host, which has a global IP address.

This graph shows the number of attacks and unwanted connections on specified ports of our server. It shows the ten ports most commonly used, but even the least commonly targeted port (in this case, port 1130) gets about 16 connections a day.

Here’s a table of the common services using each port:

Hopefully, this proves what seems to us to be obvious – there’s someone on the Internet who wants your SQL server! (And a few other things besides…) And the data above shows that there are a lot of bad guys looking for backdoored orphaned hosts on the internet. Some of them are trying to find Backdoor.Win32.Noknok, while others are trying to break in through legitimate services like Radmin and Windows Remote Desktop.

Maybe you’re wondering just who it is who is looking for badly protected resources? Here’s another graph with those details, showing how many connections different countries make to our honeypot every day:

Take a minute to compare it to the previous graph! You can see that the number of MSSQL attack attempts is mirrored by attacks coming from China. And recently, South Korean hosts have joined this massive attempt to exploit the service.

Running a honeypot helps us get valuable data; we’re kept busy analyzing it and crunching the numbers, and finally, it’s a cheap form of entertainment. Our honeypot is running on 500MHz Pentium III CPU with 384 Mb RAM, which nowadays probably costs less than $100. So if you’re thinking of throwing out some really old, slow hardware, consider setting up a honeypot! ;-)

I just came across a suspicious PDF file, so I decided to take a deeper look. Once the file was unpacked, I got an xml file with TIFF image. However, the whole thing looked very strange. The whole thing looked very fishy, and ultimately, it turned out that the xml file contained an exploit for CVE-2010-0188.

I thought it was a bit odd that we hadn’t come across files like this before, so I decided to tak a look at stats for this vulnerability:

CVE-2010-0188 exploit statistics 2010

The graph shows that malware exploiting CVE=2010-0188 started spreading actively at the end of June. It was pretty much a rarity until then. Maybe the virus writers needed a few months to catch up with creating exploits for the new hole in Adobe – who knows?

When I took a closer look, it turned out that the PDF was mainly designed to download and launch another file, Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Zbot.cm. Which, in its turn, is mainly designed to secretly install Zbot (ZeuS) to the system and to combat antivirus software.

I was able to get a final example of Zbot, but it turned out to be encrypted and obfuscated. I then got its dump and decrypted strings, which included a clear link to the banking site under attack, the bot’s http requests and some of the commands used by the botnet C&C:

Part of the decrypted Zbot file

This is the first example of an encrypted Zbot variant spreading via CVE-2010-0188. Clearly, the guys behind this program aren’t sitting on their hands, but working on the most up-to-date methods of delivering their malware to end users.

The vulnerability in the Windows Help and Support Center (CVE-2010-1885) has been a constant irritation to antivirus experts for the third week in succession. I will try to provide an analysis of the problem with the help of KSN.

We first detected samples of the exploit on 10 June and at the time of writing, over 14,000 attacks using CVE-2010-1885 have been registered.

The graph above shows the number of detections per day.

However, the most important feature is the figure indicating the exploit’s distribution on the Internet. According to KSN, on 2 July, 2010 the total number of websites hosting the exploit averaged 300.

Later today Microsoft will release its latest security patches. These will include a Critical update for Windows and three others for Office (the highest of which will also be Critical). You can find the notifications in the usual place.

The use of unpatched vulnerabilies continues to be a significant part of the cyber threat landscape and, unsurprisingly, has kept Microsoft busy during 2006, as the table below shows.

We hope that the release of Windows Vista will mean less patches, but since current systems will be with us for some time to come, we'll need to remain on our guard to stay secure.