“Jumcar” is the name we have given to a family of malicious code developed in Latin America – particularly in Peru – and which, according to our research, has been deploying attack maneuvers since March 2012.

After six months of research we can now detail the specific features of Jumcar. We will communicate these over the following days. Essentially the main purpose of the malware is stealing financial information from Latin American users who use the home-banking services of major banking companies. Of these, 90% are channeled in Peru through phishing strategies based on cloning the websites of six banks.

Some variants of the Jumcar family also target two banks in Chile, and another in Costa Rica.

Fostering knowledge exchange among different generations of security researchers is maybe one of the best traits of a good security conference. Judging by its attendance, NoSuchCon can easily claim to be one of these. It's rare to see such a mix of young researchers and old gurus exchanging ideas and getting to know each other. Organized this year in Paris, NoSuchCon takes place in the premises of the Espace Oscar Niemeyer; admittedly, indeed a nice move putting a security conference within an art exposition center (congrats to the organizers :)) .

Espace Oscar Niemeyer

Now cybercriminals from Brazil are also interested in Bitcoin currency. In order to join the horde of phishers on the lookout for the virtual currency they have applied their best malicious technique: malicious PAC on web attacks, and phishing domains.

The malicious usage of PAC (Proxy Auto-Config) among Brazilian black hats is not something new – we’ve known about it since 2007. Generally, these kind of malicious scripts are used to redirect the victim’s connection to a phishing page of banks, credit cards and so on. We described these attacks in detail here. In 2012 a Russian Trojan banker called Capper also started using the same technique. When it’s used in drive-by-download attacks, it becomes very effective.

After registering the domain java7update.com, Brazilian criminals started attacking several websites, inserting a malicious iframe in some compromised pages:

Microsoft released a long list of updates for Microsoft software today. The most interesting appear to be those patching Internet Explorer and the kernel software vulnerabilities. In all, ten critical "use-after-free" vulnerabilities are patched in IE along with one important Information Disclosure vulnerability, and three elevation of privilege vulnerabilities are being patched as well. Almost all of these IE vulnerabilities were reported by external security researchers working through HP's Zero Day Initiative.

The recent Internet Explorer 8 0day implemented with ROP to work across ASLR-protected Windows 7, hosted on the compromised Department of Labor website and others, was used as a part of a targeted attack watering hole campaign suggested to be run by known threat actor "DeepPanda". This IE 0day was reported by the guys over at FireEye and iSight Partners. It is being patched with Security Bulletin MS13-038. The others may not have been actively used by threat actors, but as always, it is very important for all Internet Explorer users to update these asap and avoid being a victim of the more common financially motivated mass-exploitation schemes.

A bit less sexy but very important for organizations to update are the three "Important" kernel escalation of privilege vulnerabilities. While these have not yet been known to be publicly exploited, EoP are actively deployed for post-exploitation purposes and are a significant part of any infiltration exercise. All three of these problems were reported by external security researchers, to whom Microsoft extended a "thanks".

Organizations should also be aware that Http.sys in Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows 2012 is vulnerable to denial of service attacks, but exploiting this bug appears to be very difficult. Accordingly, they are rating it "Important".

Other client side apps are being patched with "Important" rated updates as well, including Word, Publisher, and more. More information on all of these updates can be found over at Microsoft's summary.

Also today, Adobe's PSIRT pushed several important updates in ColdFusion (in the crosshairs for persistent attackers on organizations) and both of their big client side apps Flash and Reader/Acrobat.

In China telecom fraud has become an increasingly common crime. Last year there were more than 170,000 telecom fraud cases, causing the loss of over $12.5 billion. The fraudsters usually call their victims and trick them into transferring cash to a criminal gang via an ATM. But recently a new breed of telecom fraud, which combines phishing sites and backdoor Trojans, has emerged.

Last week the police from the Dongcheng sub-branch of Beijing’s Public Security Bureau asked us to help investigate a telecom fraud case. The victim was defrauded of $100,000. After our investigation, the fraudsters’ tactics were laid bare.

So how does the scam work? How was the victim deceived?

First you get a call from a ‘public prosecutor’ saying that you are implicated in a financial crime and you must help with the investigation. Of course, you deny everything, but the ‘public prosecutor’ advises you to check if you are listed in an official database as a suspected criminal. To do this, they tell you to visit the “Supreme Procuratorate’s” website, which is, of course, a phishing site:

The Counter eCrime Operations Summit VII (CeCOS VII) engages questions of operational challenges and the development of common resources for the first responders and forensic professionals who protect consumers and enterprises from the electronic-crime threat every day.

The annual event, organized by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) is this time held in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The experience of many information security officers shows that only a small portion of security incidents take place as a result of meticulously planned and sophisticated targeted attacks, while most incidents are due to a lack of effective security and control measures. This post begins a series of publications about IT security threats associated with the use of legitimate software.

TeamViewer

Hugely popular, easy-to-use and practical, remote access tools have been appreciated by system administrators and developers alike, as well as by anyone who has ever needed to log on to a work computer from a remote location, whether traveling on business, working from home, or caught out by an emergency while on vacation. However, unregulated use of this software poses a threat to corporate security and may lead to security incidents.

It has been three years since we published Lock, stock and two smoking Trojans in our blog. The article describes the first piece of malware designed to attack users of online banking software developed by a company called BIFIT. There are now several malicious programs with similar functionality, including:

• Trojan-Spy.Win32.Lurk
• Trojan-Banker.Win32.iBank
• Trojan-Banker.Win32.Oris
• Trojan-Spy.Win32.Carberp
• Trojan-Banker.Win32.BifiBank
• Trojan-Banker.Win32.BifitAgent

In spite of its functionality no longer being unique, the last program on the list caught our attention.

Words and strings used by Trojan-Banker.Win32.BifitAgent

This particular piece of malware has a number of features that set it apart from other similar programs.

What a week for being in Boston! I was heading to Source Conference the very same day the blast happened. It’s hard to describe all the intense emotions when I arrived. As president Obama said today to the city of Boston: “You will run again”. All my best to you guys, stay strong.

In my presentation in Source I talked about fraud in Twitter. These days we find a lot of spam bots in this social network, both blindly sending unsolicited direct messages to other users or doing some previous semantic analysis, depending on your tweets, for a more targeted message.

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