The last week of 2012 marked the 29th installment of the Chaos Communication Congress. Organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), the congress is an annual conference on technology and its impact on society. Although the scope may look quite loose, both lectures and workshops typically revolve around privacy, freedom of information, data security and other hacking issues. Needless to say, it has always been a great success; huge, considering that black-hat sized events here in Europe are not that common. Take, for instance, the fact that this year the congress had to be held in Hamburg, as Berlin could not offer a congress center fit enough to host more than 6000 attendees. Trust me, this number was not an exaggeration at all!

I admit my expectations were quite high: after four long years of scientific symposia going back to more technical venues was indeed putting my brain in hunger-mode. However, having experienced what it means organizing events for medium sized scientific conferences, I was honestly puzzled about turning a huge building such as the Congress Center of Hamburg in a functional place ready to host lectures, workshops, and hack spaces. Boy I was wrong to be worried about it. The event lasted 4 whole days (from the 27th to the 30th) with an impeccable organization: not only were all lectures and workshops flawlessly organized, streamed, and chaired; but also all open spaces were collectivized and used for all kind of hacking purposes, from playing CTF to entry-level courses on the Arduino platform.

The speakers on the other hand could take advantage of extremely well-sized rooms, with the most important talks having available an auditorium able to host more than 2000 people. Nevertheless, I have to say I was forced to learn one thing pretty fast: if you are interested in a topic, and that topic happens to be quite a hot one, well, be ready to get to the room at least 15 minutes before show-time; seriously, being on time never worked; any room, regardless of the capacity, was liable to get full. Believe me, I was really thankful for the flawless streaming infrastructure (watching a talk on my laptop that was taking place just few meters away was indeed paradoxical :) ).

The first day's line up was respectable. The keynote was given by Jacob Appelbaum, known for his contributions to "The Tor Project", and also former spokesperson for WikiLeaks. After the usual introductions, he explained the reasons of this year's congress' zeitgeist "Not My Department". We all have heard this sentence at least once in our lives; usually uttered to belittle other people's arguments, it has always been used as an example of a closed mindset at work. Jacob's point was that this attitude is even more detrimental in an inter-connected world. What is the use of a privacy-preserving bill if our data flows through the routers of oppressive governments potentially assembling huge data sets about our lives? A new level of awareness is therefore suggested.

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

Post was updated 19.03.2012 (see below)

In the last few days a malicious program has been discovered with a valid signature. The malware is a 32- or 64-bit dropper that is detected by Kaspersky Lab as Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Mediyes or Trojan-Dropper.Win64.Mediyes respectively.

Numerous dropper files have been identified that were signed on various dates between December 2011 and 7 March 2012. In all those cases a certificate was used that was issued for the Swiss company Conpavi AG. The company is known to work with Swiss government agencies such as municipalities and cantons.

Information about the Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Mediyes digital signature

Kaspersky Lab malware researcher Tillmann Werner joins Ryan Naraine to talk about the threat from peer-to-peer botnets. The discussions range from botnet-takedown activities and the ongoing cat-and-mouse games to cope with the botnet menace.

Cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to infect systems – ideally without being noticed until it’s too late. The sky is the limit for their creativity, as the latest wave of malicious boot loaders shows. The kit has been pioneered by Brazilian Trojan bankers who aim to remove security software.

This non-traditional infection only affects systems using ntldr, the default boot loader on Windows NT up to and including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This choice was no coincidence - XP is still the most popular OS in several countries, including Brazil, where it runs on nearly 47% of all machines.

    Isn’t it great when your forecasts come true? Well, sometimes. But maybe not this time. Today I found a malicious site specially designed to fake three antivirus brands. Kaspersky is top of the list. So, what does it look like?

    While looking over some potentially malicious links from Brazil, I came across an interesting group of files. They were of varying sizes but had similar structures.
 

Kaspersky Lab chief technology officer Nikolay Grebennikov joins Ryan Naraine to discuss the evolution of anti-malware software. Grebennikov talks about the changing face of the malicious threat facing desktop users and the additional components added to Kaspersky's anti-malware products to move beyond signature-based detection of threats. He goes into detail about heuristics and emulation, behavior-based detection and newer proactive technologies to handle real-time malware detection.

After rumors about the supposed merger between SpyEye and ZeuS, and the public release of the source of the latter, it was logical that the range of possibilities opened up even more for new cybercriminals into the ecosystem of crimeware.

Consistent with this, it was only a matter of time for the emergence of new packages based on ZeuS crimeware, which is now realized. Ice IX Botnet is the first new generation of web applications developed to manage centralized botnets through the HTTP protocol based on leaked ZeuS source code.

Identifying a botnet is not an easy task sometimes, especially when one gets lost in different components like droppers, infectors and other bad stuff. Some two weeks ago, Jose Nazario from Arbor Networks pointed me to a new varmint that appears to be another peer-to-peer bot. When executed, the program installs tons of stuff that holds a number of goodies, for example

• an executable hidden in an Alternate Data Stream,
• three Bitcoin miners: the Ufasoft miner, the RCP miner and the Phoenix miner,
• a file with geo-location information for IP address ranges.

However, we leave these aside for now and focus on the botnet's architecture instead, which is really just a channel for pushing software to infected machines. Scrabbling about in the installed programs finally brought up the actual bot, which we detect as Trojan.Win32.Miner.h. The binary has some layers of obfuscation to make analysis harder but eventually writes a UPX packed executable into a memory section from where to original binary can be restored.

One of the first things that come to attention is a list of 1953 hard-coded IP address strings that are contained in the binary. These addresses are contacted by the bot during its bootstrapping phase in order to join the peer-to-peer network.