On March 4^th we spotted a large number of unusual emails being blocked by our Linux Mail Security product. The emails all contained the same PDF attachment (MD5: 97b720519aefa00da58026f03d818251) but were being sent from many different source addresses.

The emails were written in German and most were sent from German IP addresses. Below is a map showing the distribution of addresses:

The computer names referenced in the mail headers were often of the form Andreas-PC or Kerstin-Laptop (the names have been changed to protect the innocent) suggesting that they had been sent from German home computers.

This is the topic that cybercriminals are speculating about and using as a hook to infect victims. The campaign stems from malicious emails that are sent in bulk to victims:

=== Not really, especially in Latin America. Every day we register lots of similar attacks, each abusing local DNS settings. Actually these attacks are a bit different because they modify the local HOST file but the principle is the same – redirecting the victim to a malicious host via malicious DNS records.

Latin American cybercriminals are used to recycling old techniques used elsewhere in the past and what is happening right now is a growth of attacks abusing local DNS settings. The latest social engineering-based malware attack in Mexico – which imitated the Mexican tax office – is a recent example of this.

    Carolina Dieckmann, a famous Brazilian actress, recently became the victim of cyber attacks that allowed cybercriminals to steal personal property - nude pictures of her- from her computer. Many pictures or maybe all of them got leaked to the Internet. This incident has served as a good incentive for the Brazilian government to have new cybercrime laws in the country (the current law to fight cybercrime in Brazil was approved back in the 40’s of XX century). As a result of this incident, a new cybercrime law that carries a punishment of up to 2 years in prison for such crimes has finally been proposed for consideration. This is a good and right move! A press article in Portuguese can be

We recently noticed a mass mailing among the general flow of spam that at first glance looked just like the usual “forum” junk mail that appears on forums and bulletin boards, and which are sent as email notifications to users of those forums.

Here’s an unusual spam message that turned up today:

If it wasn’t for the official name at the top of the message, you could almost be forgiven for thinking it was just another real estate advert… “Fully furnished. Situated close to retail outlets. Excellent access to public transport and local schools. Contact US Department of Defense for more details…”

But on a more serious note, the aim of this mailing was most probably to check an address database. So, whatever you do, don’t reply to stuff like this. In any case, spammers often fake their return address so that all your emotional outpourings are unlikely to reach the right people. And if the spammers do use their real address, any response from you will confirm your account is active and you’ll end up getting much more unwanted mail.

At the end of 2010 I noticed a big wave of recruitment spam for money mule work. Initially, the criminals used spam sent from hacked email accounts. I even got some messages like this from people I know personally:

Right after that, to speed-up the recruitment process, the messages came via Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN):

And of course, the criminals also used legitimate accounts that had been hacked to spread their messages. Finally, right before the end of the year I saw a big campaign on Facebook, especially targeting Spanish speaking communities. But yesterday I was completely surprised when I found an advertising banner on a legitimate IT site leading to the same page – money mule recruitment.

All these developments make think there is a huge demand on the black market for money mule workers. The criminals seem to have enough stolen information like credit card PINs, as well as details for online banking accounts and payment systems. Their problem now is how to launder the money they have made. Our statistics confirm there is a clear growth in Trojan-Spy malware able to steal any kind of personal information. This includes well known Trojans like Zbot (Zeus) or SpyEye.

It’s worth remembering that money mule activity is considered illegal. Basically, if nobody wanted to launder their money, cybercriminals would find it much harder to make money from stolen account details. Everyone can contribute in their own way to the global security, not just AV and other Security companies.

Today my colleague Jorge Mieres found some interesting information related to the new HLux botnet.

This new worm is propagating via e-mail with a backboned administration through a crimeware pack called BOMBA. The scam messages come with a message to a fake eCard requiring installing Flash Player (an old scammers trick).

 
After the infection, the newly installed malware downloads a malicious update which is detected by Kaspersky as Email-Worm.Win32.Hlux.c and establishes a connection with BOMBA’s server reporting statistics about the infection.

 
Our statistics for Jan 5 show countries with the highest infection attempts are the U.S., Germany and the U.K.
 

We’ll keep researching this issue and will keep you updated.

We're raising our threat level by a notch. Not something that we do as often as we used to. There are several reasons for this decision, but one of them really stands out.

We've identified a worm called VBMania. This might not sound like anything much, but in contrast to most worms today, it spreads via email. Real old school. Additionally, it works on the the principle of "download and run".

The worm spreads by sending emails from the infected computer. The messages have a subject line of "Here you have" and random text such as "This is The Free Dowload Sex Movies,you can find it Here". Of course, the messages also include a link to a file on the Internet.

Click on the link, save and run the file and voila - your machine is infected.

In spite of this primitive propagation routine, the worm is pretty active, and currently sending out significant amounts of mail.

Because of this, and also because there's been a lot of news about this worm flying around, we've decided to raise the threat level with the aim of informing as many people as possible.

The worm's written in Visual Basic, and our products detect it proactively using heuristics as Suspicious:HEUR:Trojan.Win32.Generic.

Last night we also added signature detection (Trojan-Win32.Swisyn) which we're going to rename to Email-Worm.Win32.VBMania.

UPDATE:As of 1600 GMT, all the malicious worm files which were located on members.multimania.co.uk had been deleted. This means the worm won't be able to propagate further. However, infected computers will continue to send emails until they're disinfected.

While analysing the worm we also identified an earlier variant - Trojan.Win32.Swisyn.ajgd. It was first detected in August this year, had similar functionality, and was also spread from the member areas on members.multimania.co.uk and lycos.co.uk.

    Cyber-criminals in Brazil and the wider Latin America region almost always use social engineering tricks to launch attacks.  Sometimes, they send fake bank e-mails or e-mails from popular Internet services. The e-mail databases of the potential victims are being compiled based on the stolen e-mail addresses from the infected machines and particularly from the addresses stored in e-mail clients.

Once the e-mail addresses are compiled, the fraudsters use several external tools like PHP shells on hacked Web servers.

During my daily analysis, I found an interesting shell for mass mailing. The code shows it was developed locally in Brazil:

By editing the original PHP code, the criminal can fake the “original headers” of the messages they send.  Very interesting.
 

Now let’s check the original IP address of the mentioned domain:

As you see in this case, the criminals are sending fake e-mails using the identity of IG (www.ig.com.br) a very popular Internet resource in Brazil. They fake the mailer, the original IP address and even the Spam scoring. So, there is a big probability this e-mail will be delivered usefully to the victim, bypassing anti-spam filters.  Even the most experienced IT people can be tricked into believing that the message came from IG.

During analysis of the code, I discovered another interesting bit of information related to the shell. The server was hacked by a famous defacer from Brazil (name withheld during this investigation) who is quiet active and notorious around the world.   On September 7th alone,  he/she defaced 42 different domains.

In the past, we’ve seen Web defacers act with only with political motivation. That has now changed. The Web defacers are being used by the online money gangs as a part of outsourced services.