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

Just a quick note, it's only the second week of January, but early 2013 brings with it the first Java 0day mass exploit distribution of the year.

There appears to be multiple ad networks redirecting to Blackhole sites, amplifying the mass exploitation problem. We have seen ads from legitimate sites, especially in the UK, Brazil, and Russia, redirecting to domains hosting the current Blackhole implementation delivering the Java 0day. These sites include weather sites, news sites, and of course, adult sites. A few obfuscated files are being delivered to victim systems with names like Stretch.jar, Edit.jar, UTTER-OFFEND.JAR, and more. The first appearance of the exploit's prevention in our KSN community seemed to be January 6th. But as we dig back further, we find related samples from mid-December. So, we have been preventing this 0day in particular for quite some time. At this point, it seems that the first instance of the particular 0day jar file contents ITW is 7550ce423b2981ad5d3aaa5691832aa6. Filenames for the class files remain the same until recently. It would be interesting to see an earlier instance.

As for Kaspersky users, our automatic exploit prevention (AEP) is generically preventing the 0day. Surprisingly, while there doesn't appear to be a high level of server-side polymorphic obfuscation in the class files themselves, the hosted exploit files are being updated and changing since yesterday. Instead, the Blackhole developers and operators put a lot of effort behind shifting domain names.

Update (2012.01.10 3:30 p.m. MT) - Metasploit developers have added an exploit module targeting this vulnerability CVE-2013-0422.

The Java 0day activity that we have been monitoring and preventing for almost the past week has been irresponsibly reported on other blogs, with early posts publicly linking to known sites serving the 0day. In itself, the race to publish on this 0day that will be assigned CVE-2012-4681 (a problem with processing access control within "protection domains"), has been irresponsible. Would you encourage folks to walk down a mugger's dark alley with no protection or would you work to communicate the muggers' whereabouts to the right folks and work on lighting the alley or giving better directions? Would you provide muggers with some new weapons that they haven't considered? The efforts this time around seem misplaced.

Anyway, initial sites hosting the exploit were unique and spreading known APT related toolset components, including a Poison Ivy variant. Here is a somewhat unexpected heat map of early, related PIvy detections.

And here is a heat map of early detections for related web pages and javascript delivering the Java exploit:

All the related malware that I have seen to this point targeted Windows systems. The exploits are effective against Java 7 and since the initial targeted attacks, news and the samples spread throughout the broader security community and the exploits made their way to metasploit developers, who added PoC to the open source framework. In turn, the Blackhole authors added the exploit to their COTS. So the attacks are widespread at this point. The first victim regions to be hit with the Blackhole stuff were the US, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Germany, the Ukraine and Moldova. But, in relation to the other exploits included in the pack, victims are getting hit only a fair number of times with the 0day. Internet Explorer users are being hit the most, followed by Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, and then a variety of other applications that handle URLs within their documents and eventually pass the malicious .jar on to a Java client, like Adobe Reader.

We are using a variety of detections and techniques to identify the malicious sites, the web pages involved, the exploit code, and the backdoor payloads delivered by these sites. Even though this particular Java 0day is getting hyped, other older exploits in the Blackhole exploit pack continue to get hit on victim systems with higher volume. So our community is protected from the Blackhole sites themselves, the Blackhole webpages serving the Blackhole Java 0day, compromised sites redirecting to the Blackhole sites, the more prevalent older Blackhole exploits and their delivery pages, and the trojans being delivered by these Blackhole sites. In addition to all that, Kaspersky "Advanced Exploit Prevention" adds another runtime/behavioral layer of protection against the 0day itself with with "Exploit.Java.Generic". This addition is the most interesting to myself - exploit pack authors have been focused on improving their Java exploit server-side polymorphism, and this AEP feature defeats those efforts. So, our user community will see access denied altogether for current Blackhole sites, individual Blackhole web pages detected with variations on "Trojan-Downloader.JS.Agent", the backdoors detected with "Trojan.Win32.Generic" and others (i.e., 61A3CE517FD8736AA32CAF9081F808B4, DEC9676E97AE998C75A58A02F33A66EA, 175EFFD7546CBC156E59DC42B7B9F969, 0C72DF76E96FA3C2A227F3FE4A9579F3), and the 0day Java exploit code detected with "HEUR:Exploit.Java.Agent.gen" (i.e. E441CF993D0242187898C192B207DC25, 70C555D2C6A09D208F52ACCC4787A4E2, E646B73C29310C01A097AA0330E24E7B, 353FD052F2211168DDC4586CB3A93D9F, 32A80AAE1E134AFB3D5C651948DCCC7D) among others, along with the runtime AEP prevention. So while you may see a few links to Virustotal with the inevitable complaining that a scanner is missing a specific chunk of altered code along with innaccurate claims that "AV is dead!" or "AV can't detect it", you should take them for the grain of salt that they are. The real story about client side mass exploitation is more complex than those claims. Some researchers call the various points in a delivery vector a kill chain, and Kaspersky products are killing it.

At the same time, Oracle needs to step it up and deliver an OOB patch, which historically they have failed to do. Maybe this event will provide even more pressure to step up their security update delivery process. They have been snapping up some good security research talent and beginning to reach out, which is a start. A very late start.

UPDATE (2012.08.30): Oracle patches CVE-2012-4681 and two other client side RCE vulnerabilities. It is probably a better idea for Windows users to go to their control panel, find the Java applet, and use the Java update software to manually get the latest JRE 7 and 6 releases - the default delay for the Java Update package to check is currently one week for the Java 7 installer.

Market share! It’s an easy answer, but not the only one.

In 2011, Apple was estimated to account for over 5% of worldwide desktop/laptop market share. This barrier was a significant one to break - Linux maintains under 2% market share and Google ChromeOS even less. This 15 year peak coincided with the first exploration by the aggressive FakeAv/Rogueware market targeting Apple computers, which we discovered and posted in April 2011 and later in May 2011, which no longer seem to be such an odd coincidence. Also, the delay in Apple malware until now most likely was not because Apple exploits were unavailable, or because the Mac OS X system is especially hardened. The 2007 "Month of Apple Bugs" demonstrated that the Mac OS X and supporting code is full of exploitable flaws. Safari, Quicktime, and other software on Apple devices is regularly exploited during pwnage contests, but widespread cybercrime attention hadn’t caught on until this past year.

At this point, we still don't know who is behind Flashfake, so we don’t know for sure that they were the same Mac OS X FakeAv/Rogueware group. Speculating that eastern euro-cybercrime is behind the botnet would be a pretty confident way to go right now. There are known groups from the region that have succeeded at wringing ad revenues from traffic hijacking. We don't believe that other sensitive data has been targeted. And the exploit distribution URLs that we are aware of have only targeted mac users. These factors limit the operational and technical needs of a financially motivated cybercrime gang.

In a sense, it would appear that their activity was somewhat similar to the Koobface or Tdss gangs. They haven't commited large unique financial crimes to attract the attention of law enforcement, and their malware contains hooks and other code to perform more sophisticated banking crime than search traffic hijacking, but they most likely were looking to make a multitude of small financial gains. On the other hand, thankfully, Apple hasn't given these guys ample notice to make their run. There can be plenty of money in that business - it is estimated that the Koobface guys ran off with millions after Facebook "outted" their operation under investigation. But based on the domain registrations we have examined, the individuals are not quite so public and they are hiding their identities while they hijack search engine traffic. The malware itself injects a number of hooks into running applications, much like the Zeus, SpyEye, and other spyware. If these were used for financial crimes, the group operating this botnet would need to organize money mules and accomplices to launder their stolen money, which would grow the group and attract the attention of other authorities.

On the technology side, Java is a big part of the puzzle. Although the Trojan is called Flashfake because users were being convinced to install the malware as an Adobe Flash update, more recent versions of the malware were being installed via client-side Java exploitation.

Three vulnerabilities were targeted with client-side exploits, none of them were 0day, which seem to have become much more difficult to come by. Besides, this set worked just as well for these operators. It is interesting to note the duration of time from the original Oracle Java security update to the Apple Java security update, and when in that timeframe the release offensive security research publicly appeared. And, when were Metasploit open source exploit modules were released targeting the related Java vulnerabilities? The windows of time may be alarming – these are not 0day exploits, but Apple simply hasn’t released patches, leaving their customers exposed to the equivalent of known 0day exploits.

CVE-2012-0507

2012-02-15 Oracle patches Atomic Reference Array vulnerability

2012-03-10 First Itw exploits targeting the vuln

2012-03-30 Metasploit developers add Java atomicreferencearray exploit module

2012-04-03 Apple patches their code

CVE-2011-3544

2011-05-12 Reported to vendor

2011-11-18 Oracle patched their Java SE

2011-11-30 Metasploit developers add "Rhino exploit" module

2011-11-30 Krebs reports operational Blackhole site with the new Java exploit

2012-3-29 Patched by Apple

CVE-2008-5353

"Deserializing Calendar objects"

2008-08-01 Reported to Sun with first instance of the vulnerability

2008-12-03 Sun patches their code (Sun link down)

2009-05-15 Apple patches MacOSX code

2009-06-16 Metasploit developers add Java deserialization exploit

Also on this list is a lame exploit described as a signed applet social engineering trick.

I'd prefer to call it the "the terribly confused user presented with the Java 'do you want to trust this applet?' dialog and will run anything you present them" gamble. It first became a part of the Metasploit exploit module list on 2010-01-27. Basically, these guys present the user with a file that the user thinks is a JavaUpdate provided by Apple Inc themselves, which they grant trust to perform any action on their machine. The downloader will then communicate with a couple of sites to register and download new Flashfake components. These components in turn, collect the system UUID and timestamp, then auto-generate with a crypto algorithm a set of C2 domains, along with maintaining a list of hard coded domains. A couple of the newer components inject into running processes on the system hooking software functionality and hijacking traffic, much like past TDS malware.

In this webcast, Kurt Baumgartner talks about the rise of exploits against vulnerabilities in Oracle’s Java software. The discussion centers around the exploitation of Java vulnerabilities in exploit kits and the poor state of patching on the Windows platform.

In April, the .co.cc and .cz.cc sub-domains were absolutely littered with malware distributing web sites, and the unusually telling DNS registration setup on .co.cc and .cz.cc had forecast the previously upcoming Apple FakeAv. That DNS setup later led to FakeAv downloads for the Mac as forecast. But FakeAv distribution has been steadily declining since the beginning of the year, and a few related major events have occurred over the past six months. Blackhole operators have migrated to .info domains, along with other related malicious site operators. Have they pushed .info to become the new .cc?

So, what has this dispersion looked like? Well, let's look back to the beginning of the year. .co.cc and .cz.cc domain registrars offered free dns registration and cheap or free hosting. Malware distributors abused these cheap resources and staged the Blackhole exploit pack using these URL names, serving up FakeAv and other nastiness. Java exploits became the most effective and most popular in the Blackhole set, followed by exploits targeting vulnerable Adobe Reader and Microsoft HCP software. Traffic was directed to these kits by Google Image Search Poisoning, by compromising legitimate sites and redirecting browsers to the kit sites with injected iframe and img src tags, and by successful malvertizing campaigns on major webmail providers. But, what goes up must come down.

At Virus Bulletin 2011, we presented on the exploding level of delivered Java exploits this year with "Firing the roast - Java is heating up again". We examined CVE-2010-0840 exploitation in detail, along with variants of its most common implementation on the web and some tools and tips for analysis. Microsoft’s security team presented findings for 2011 that mirrored ours in relation to Java exploit prevalence on the web – it is #1! At the same time, aside from the recent, well-known BEAST Java implementation, it is striking that it has been very uncommon to see Java backdoors, Trojans and spyware. But that lack of Java malware variety is beginning to change. My colleague, malware analyst Roman Unucheck, identified a new Java bot with some interesting characteristics that we named "Backdoor.Java.Racac".

Overshadowed by the Duqu madness yesterday, Oracle released a slew of critical updates (please see "Related Links" in the right column of this page). Most interesting, but perhaps with little impact, is the Java SE BEAST update. Oracle claims to have pushed 57 different fixes across their product lines, including patches for Java and their virtualization Sun Ray product. But the hottest thing to talk about, of course, is the patch closing up CVE-2011-3389, or holes in the JSSE.

The BEAST researchers' demo at Ekoparty Argentina that we posted on last month developed a fresh exploit to crack SSL/TLS sessions with a technique described almost a decade ago. The trick is always in the implementation, not the discussion, so it was impressive work that left the major software vendors with some heavy work. That list of vendors included Oracle, because the exploit developed for the demo abused vulnerabilities in Java code (the researchers claimed that vulnerabilities exist in Microsoft's Silverlight and Javascript code too, they just didn't deliver the exploit in those forms. Unfortunately, Silverlight BEAST exploit code is publicly available). The exploit almost turned into more of a disaster when Mozilla considered blocking all Java add-on use from their browsers: "We are currently evaluating the feasibility of disabling Java universally in Firefox installs and will update this post if we do so." So, it is somewhat surprising that Oracle rated this fix low within their risk matrix with a "Base Score" of 4.3 (on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most risk).

Meanwhile, Oracle gives six different Java patches a base score on their risk matrix of "10", with four of those highest risk level patches impacting the recently released Java 7. They impact logic within the JRE itself, AWT, Deserialization, and Scripting components within the JRE.

I've seen Oracle's virtualization product "Sun Ray" adopted in a variety of corporate cloud situations, and cloud admin should be aware that the platform is impacted with a fix for CVE-2011-3538 and related authentication issues.

With headlines like "New cyber threat compromises financial information - Experts say new threat could affect millions of sites", you would think that the trust model of the internet is finally crumbled.

Following an hour long Friday evening wait for the demo, the Ekoparty demo for the SSL hack was staged. And it was interesting that the attack succeeded in cracking the SSL confidentiality model as implemented by the Mozilla Firefox browser when communicating with paypal.com web servers over https. At the same time, it seemed to be an impractical exploit targeting a weakness that was fixed three months ago in Chromium source code.

Also of note, is the fact that the attack has been well known for almost 10 years, it's just that there hasn't been a practical exploit implementing the attack. And that they refined their blockwise attack model far better than previous chosen-plaintext attack models, making it more effective than prior attacks.

So there seems to be another good security reason to use Google's Chrome browser, for those of you highly sensitive to security issues. Also interesting were some of the tricks they used to make it work. While they couldn't get it to work in pure javascript or flash, they implemented the exploit in a Java applet and attacked the stream between Firefox and https://paypal.com. The "tricks" they used to bypass "Same Origin Policy" with Java were surprising, and they came up with the entire stolen session cookie with which to log in to paypal.com as the victim over http in under three minutes. While I am sure that the other browser vendors will update their CBC encryption routines to better randomize their IV and overcome this attack as suggested almost ten years ago, one could use Chrome and maintain secure communications in regards to this exploit. To me, this exploit is a low risk one because of its impracticality. Whether they properly disclosed their work to all browser vendors, giving developers plenty of time prior to disclosure remains a question to me, but they did contact at least the Chrome team. Interesting research and impressive effort implementing a difficult to work concept certainly. These guys know crypto and communications technologies. But the sky has not fallen. Yet.

For related technical information, and thoughts from relevant developers and researchers, please check out my "Related Links" list to the right side of the post text. I try to be thorough in my selection.

UPDATE(9/26): Microsoft advises that they are investigating the matter for their Internet Explorer browser customers, stating that the issue is low risk anyways, "Considering the attack scenario, this vulnerability is not considered high risk to customers". Perhaps they were one of the browser vendors that were not contacted about the vulnerability.

Over the past couple months, some advertising networks have been distributing ads that redirect browsers to sites hosting exploits.

Spotify's advertising network was most recently outed (note that it is the third party banner ads rotating through the client's ad frames). Most of the redirections we have been been monitoring have sent users to a variety of servers in the .cc TLD. We have been working with providers to ensure the ads aren't on their networks, but the groups have been active in rotating malvertizing banners through multiple networks.