After the recent emergence of the criminal PiceBOT in Latin America, AlbaBotnet has joined the growing ranks of regional IT crime. It revolves around online pharming, with a view to delivering targeted phishing attacks which steal information from the online accounts of two major Chilean banks.

According to the data we have processed, this campaign is part of a trial stage of this botnet: up to now there has been no monetization of AlbaBotnet. We do know that the author of this threat began testing it in early 2012.

The botnet appears to have a similar structure to its Latin American counterparts. As well as the default automated malware builder, it includes a package which automatically sends emails. Thus, the botmaster can customize infection campaigns through the classic mechanisms of visual social engineering:

Following in the wake of the vOlk (Mexico) and S.A.P.Z. (Peru) botnets comes PiceBOT, a newbie to the Latin American cybercrime scene. The cost on the black market is currently around $140.

Like other crimeware of its kind, its main purpose is the distribution of malware that steals financial information through local pharming attacks (arbitrary modification of a hosts file). Despite its recent onset (less than a month) it has already been adopted by Latin American cybercriminals to target clients of major banks. So far we have recorded phishing attacks generated and managed through this botnet in Chile, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Argentina. The following image, obtained from an underground forum, shows some examples:

Earlier this week, we published our report on “Red October”, a high-level cyber-espionage campaign that during the past five years has successfully infiltrated computer networks at diplomatic, governmental and scientific research organizations.

In part one, we covered the most important parts of the campaign: the anatomy of the attack, a timeline of the attacker’s operation, the geographical distribution of the victims, sinkhole information and presented a high level overview of the C&C infrastructure.

Today we are publishing part two of our research, which comprises over 140 pages of technical analysis of the modules used in the operation.

When analyzing targeted attacks, sometimes researchers focus on the superficial system infection and how that occurred. Sometimes, that is sufficient, but in the case of Kaspersky Lab, we have higher standards. This is why our philosophy is that it’s important to analyze not just the infection, but to answer three very important questions:

What happens to the victim after they’re infected?

What information is being stolen?

Why is “Red October” such a big deal compared to other campaigns like Aurora or Night Dragon?

According to our knowledge, never before in the history of ITSec has an cyber-espionage operation been analyzed in such deep detail, with a focus on the modules used for attack and data exfiltration. In most cases, the analysis is compromised by the lack of access to the victim’s data; the researchers see only some of the modules and do not understand the full purpose of the attack or what was stolen.

To get around these hiccups, we set up several fake victims around the world and monitored how the attackers handled them over the course of several months. This allowed us to collect hundreds of attack modules and tools. In addition to these, we identified many other modules used in other attacks, which allowed us to gain a unique insight into the attack.

Many things have been told already about the latest Skype malware spread via instant messages. However I just wanted to add something not mentioned yet. The first thing is about when the attack was launched first. According to Google Short URL service it first surfaced on Oct 6th :

    Whenever an important event takes place, new opportunities for cyber criminals, especially for those who develop attacks based on social engineering, arise.  Currently, the whole world has its eyes glued to TV screens watching the London 2012 Olympic Games. Worldwide interest on this event is so strong that cyber criminals were quick to take advantage of this opportunity and launched multiple campaigns promoting alleged paid online TV programming that would allow users to see live broadcasts of the Olympic Games via the Internet.  Several fake pages were found with titles such as:

Best way to watch London 2012 Olympics online live stream HD
London 2012 Live Streaming

    This year cybercriminals haven’t been particularly active in exploiting the upcoming holiday season to snare victims with their scams. The first evidence of a growing trend of festive fraud only began to emerge about a week ago. Interestingly, this year’s attacks are somewhat different from previous years. This time round cybercriminals aren’t just going for hard cash – they are also looking for other assets that can be converted into money, such as air miles.

Latin America has ceased to be a region that simply receives attacks from across the world.

Since late 2009 it has begun to copy fraudulent business models through which American cybercriminals have begun producing their own criminal resources.

Examples include Brazil, with the web application called TELA (to manage the information stolen from zombie computers); or S.A.P.Z. from Peru, used to propagate malicious code designed to steal bank details. But of course, these are not the only ones. Mexico has also joined this list, with different crimeware developments. Tequila and Mariachi crimeware programs started the trend in this region, back in 2009. But the newest is VOlk-Botnet. The following image shows the main page:

The title of this post suggests that I’ve been thinking of one of the cyber-criminals that uses SpyEye, maybe in admiration! But actually his cyber-criminal actions overshadow anything else.

The truth is that, following my post highlighting the tactic of using as C&C one of the Cloud Computing services offered by Amazon, I found a sample of SpyEye that is somewhat interesting: among its goals is an attack DDoS directed against the Kaspersky Lab website.

The SpyEye configuration file, which is basically a compressed file and password protected (usually MD5), stores the resources involved in the planned attack. The surprise came when I looked at the configuration file of the plugin (ddos.dll.cfg). The following image shows the parameters set in this file:

Cloud Computing providers offer gigabytes of storage for free, and the cybercriminals use to maintain and spread malware of all the kind. At the same time, many legitimate services are not free, but are still very attractive to cybercrime gangs. In the case of Amazon, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) does the trick.

Despite being a paid service, the cost is not an obstacle for profitable attackers. In fact, my colleague Dmitry Bestuzhev recently told us about the spread of malware exploiting this service to "the cloud".

The truth is that these cases are not isolated. According to our research, cybercriminals have been running SpyEye activities and from Amazon for the past couple of weeks.

It is clear that cybercriminals do not have any code of ethics. Consequently, even the most innocent are not exempt from a malicious attacker’s perspective, and are often used as a means to allow them to generate higher economic returns, in this case, through the abuse of clicks.

The following image provides clear evidence of this. Designed with an interface that’s "user friendly" for kids, this website invites you to download a threat detected by Kaspersky Lab as not-a-virus: AdWare.Win32.BHO.tbz.