TechBlog

Starting at ~3:20pm GMT today, Canadian Pharmacy spammers began using attached MP3 files as the call-to-action for their latest campaign. The message had no subject, no “text” body content, just an attached “audio/mpeg” file with a random lower case file name. Upon playing the attached mp3 file, you find out why I called it the “call-to-action”. A robotic sounding woman’s voice reads off the URL they would like recipients to browse to (letter by letter), with porn-like moaning as background noise. I guess they are going for the often used spam tactic of tying ED pills (Viagra, Cialis, etc..) to porn star-like performance in bed. ...

Earlier on this morning I happened to notice a redirect page used in a meds spam campaign that just happened to also be compromised with a malicious script. You can see the META tag redirect that will instruct the browser to immediately load the page on the target site. And immediately below, it, the obfuscated JavaScript injected into the page. Deobfuscating this script, we can see its payload is also redirection, this time to a malware site. ...

Earlier this evening, Microsoft formally announced a new search app for iPhone on the Bing Community blog. The Bing app is available now from the App Store, complete with voice search. I emphasize the now because the app has a December 16 release date on the 15th. Based on a very quick, cursory look, Bing is a competent iPhone app, tapping into the kind of capabilities expected from the platform. Bing fits nicely into the App Store repertoire. I wouldn’t call the features revolutionary — Apple and Google are there already with advanced mapping and GPS — but the packaging appeals, and Microsoft manages to offer a user experience that is fairly consistent with Bing Web search. ...

It’s not a huge surprise that we are seeing some malware spam runs where the malicious attachment attempts to portray itself as a Christmas Greeting of some sort. Here’s an example from today (md5: C670165AE6DFA8318F0EA795B1D3AD55). This one is actually a Zapchast (IRC bot variant). The “Christmas Card” requires it’s own “special version” of Flash to be installed — flashplayer2009.exe — which is the malware itself. Once ready, it will display this friendly message written in Universal Gibberish. ...

I blogged about the three generations of the WiniGuard family of rogue security products that began in October of 2008. Friday, the 50th rogue in that line appeared. Analyst Patrick Jordan noted that there appeared to be a newly named clone added to the “genealogy” about every 48 hours. He’s been right. Monday they found GuardPCS and today they found TheDefender. Its associated web site was registered Dec. 4. Fraudulent operators behind the rogues seem to be doing two things to confuse Internet users and lure them into purchasing this worthless scare ware: ...

New rogue borrows massively from AV company sites Our friend M.N. Bharath drew our attention to this web site associated with the new System Adware Scanner 2010 rogue security product. Although the group claims 10 million users world-wide, oddly enough their site was only registered Nov. 25. It seems they also have recruited the entire management team from AVG anti-virus company as well. Right! Compare the names on the Smart Systems Technologies rogue page. http://sysadscanner.com/about.php ...

Don’t go there. There are a lot of rogue downloaders hiding in those links. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, speaking at the UBS Media and Communications Conference in New York, said the Tiger Woods sex scandal was a better traffic generator than the death of Michael Jackson, according to the ZDNet blog.

The third generation of WiniGuard gets a new clone every 48 hours A new rogue security product called IGuardPC, is the 50th clone of the WiniGuard family of rogue security products. That makes WiniGuard the largest rogue family ever. The WiniGuard family began in September of 2008. Operators behind it have added variants that has sorted into three generations. The latest generation gets a new clone about every 48 hours to stay ahead of public awareness and anti-malware detections. ...

Case in point: findproper[dot]org These are the types of sites that are used to download from third party affiliate sites. If the setup.exe had run, it would have installed the AntiMalware rogue.

What’s the best way to distract an online gamer while you drop some undesirable files onto their system? We saw what’s probably a pretty effective method today in Troj/Lneage-A. This particular Trojan leaves the user viewing a slideshow of topless elves while it drops a file designed to steal their gaming info. Given that the vast majority of MMORPG’ers are male, and bless them they’re often a little bit lonely, dazzling them with a variety of images of well endowed half naked elves (I think they’ve had some work done to be honest) should be enough to keep them entertained while the malware authors do whatever they fancy in the background. ...