Rogue Software

Norman Security Blog wrote a good article about Fake AVs and their new variants and how to protect ourselves, Credit to my friend, Pondus, for sharing this: Background Fake antimalware has become a profitable industry for the cybercriminals. New variants appear on a daily basis, and new techniques for tricking the users are fine-tuned. A few weeks ago we wrote in our security article – Cybercriminals focus on new targets – about fake antimalware for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. In its security update 2011-003 for Mac OS X, available 31 May, Apple enhanced considerably its protection against malware. This includes the ability to automatically download new malware signatures, similar to the functionality found in standard antimalware tools. This signifies that Apple now regards its Mac OS X platform as a serious target for cybercriminals. ...

You might want to steer clear of the following fake security program, being promoted as a “Windows Trojan Removal Kit” but actually hijacking your PC in the form of the ThinkPoint rogue with a mixed (24/43) detection rate. The file is currently being offered up by your typical “fake security scan” pages, such as microsoftwindowssecurity152(dot)com. Those familiar with this particular rogue will be aware that it tends to stick with domains similar to the one above. ...

SophosLab: Once again, a rogue application is spreading virally between Facebook users pretending to offer you a way of seeing who has viewed your profile. As we’ve described a couple of times before, plenty of Facebook users would *love* to know who has been checking them out online.. but unfortunately scammers are aware of this, and use the lure of such functionality as a way to trick you into making bad decisions. ...

Have you seen a message like this on Facebook? I just got the Dislike button, so now I can dislike all of your dumb posts lol!! If so, don’t click on the link. It’s the latest survey scam spreading virally across Facebook, using the tried-and-tested formula used in the past by other viral scams including “Justin Bieber trying to flirt”, “Student attacked his teacher and nearly killed him”, “the biggest and scariest snake” and the “world’s worst McDonald’s customer”. ...

There is a well-respected and very useful site that everyone in the anti-virus industry uses – sometimes several times a day: Virus Total. You can upload suspicious files or their check sums to Virus Total to see if a file is malicious. The makers of a new rogue have picked up on the Virus Total name in an effort to make their malicious creation look like something legitimate: What it tries to download is detected as FraudTool.Win32.FakeRean (fs). Here’s what the real Virus Total site looks like. It basically runs your code sample or check sum against 41 anti-virus engines and displays the resulting detections. ...

Niels Provos of the Google Security Team has blogged about the rise of malicious web sites carrying rogue security products, which the Google team calls “Fake AV.” Google has been engaged in a constant battle against the sites because the operators who peddle them have been refining their techniques for poisoning Google search engine results in order to victimize Google users by drawing them to malicious download sites. He wrote: “we conducted an in-depth analysis of the prevalence of Fake AV over the course of the last 13 months, and the research paper containing our findings, ‘The Nocebo Effect on the Web: An Analysis of Fake AV distribution’ is going to be presented at the Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET) in San Jose, CA on April 27th.” ...

Lots of little newsworthy updates recently . . . they’ve been well-covered elsewhere, but we wanted to make sure our readers saw them as well. Russia: Safe Haven no more? One of the constant complaints that we hear is “the criminal is probably in Russia”, as an excuse for why a case is not worth investigating. Back on November 11, 2009, we posted a story The $9 Million World-wide Bank Robbery, where VIKTOR PLESHCHUK, 28, of St. Petersburg, Russia; SERGEI TŠURIKOV, 25, of Tallinn, Estonia; and OLEG COVELIN, 28, of Chişinău, Moldova were charged with leading the robbery, which actually occurred in 2008. This week the Financial Times has revealed that Viktor Pleshchuk was arrested by the FSB. Their story leads with: ...

One our researchers was reading the comments about Dancing With The Stars, and Kate Gosselin’s performance (He’s a huge fan … don’t ask), when he noticed a link to a URL shortening service. Given that it was advertising a video of Kate Gosselin topless, he astutely realised that was a bit suspicious, and checked it out inside a nice, safe virtual pc. Indeed, the shortening service immediately transferred to a website showing a picture of Kate at the beach… ...

We’ve been seeing Fake AV programs getting more convincing for a while now. Some of the tricks employed by the guys behind these rogue programs include Windows-7-style fake scanners, in-browser “scanners”, and program features that ape other aspects of the operating system. Yesterday, though, we came across a misleading application called AntiVirusDemoFraud that is—how to say?—possibly a little less sophisticated than some in terms of user interface design. ...

Does a Facebook-specific antivirus application sound like a good idea? Maybe not. One of our analysts saw this particular application claiming to be an antivirus wreak havoc on his Friends list. Of course, there is no such thing. Once installed on one Friend’s account, this application tags 20 Friend into a picture such as the one below: If a Friend looking through the photos then clicks on the app’s (apparently randomly generated) link, they’ll see this: ...

Yesterday there was a volcanic eruption in Iceland, near the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier, that has led the Icelandic authorities to declare a state of emergency in southern Iceland. People living nearby have been evacuated in case of glacial melt water flooding and the airspace near the now active volcano is effectively closed off. As you have probably already guessed, any event which commands a high level of public interest will be pounced on quickly by the makers of fake antivirus software in order to make a quick buck. This incident is no exception. ...

With Windows 7 becoming increasingly popular, more and more software companies have begun to upgrade their interface for the latest Microsoft operating system. Manufacturers seem to understand the need for a beautiful user interface for their products. However, not all software behaves as good as it looks. Today, I saw a Fake Antivirus program with a newer, more jazzed up interface, which we detect as Troj/FakeAle-RK. This malware specifically targets users of Windows 7 and appears in the form of a pop-up dialogue box, which attempts to tell you that your Windows 7 PC has many serious threats. When a user clicks “Remove all Threats immediately”, another pop-up will be generated asking them to download a file called win_protection_update.exe. ...

Are Mac OS X rogues an emerging threat? For many years discussions of the potential for malware on Macs have ended with the conclusion: “there isn’t much yet, but as soon as Mac gets a big market share the dark side is going to start writing the code.” There are indications that the bad guys are working on it. There have been some blog posts suggesting that the dark side is working hard to create a Mac OS X compatible rogue. SCMagazine is carrying a piece quoting a spokesman for researchers at Intego. Apparently Intego researchers got proof-of-concept code for an OS X rogue from underground sources and determined that it didn’t quite work. However, they concluded that some sophisticated coding was going on: ...

It’s time for your daily dose of “spot the fake program / avoid the fake program”. What is it this time? Well, if you have family members who are into webcams and chatting you might want to point them to this writeup because a new challenger has entered the ring: Yes, “Chat Cam” is a rather smart looking (and entirely fake) program designed to make end users think they’re taking part in a large community of webcam owners. Clearly, the creator had the recently launched Chatroulette in mind when they made this one (if you’re not familiar with it, Chatroulette is a site where you jump from webcam chat to webcam chat over and over again, all within one large community of strangers. In practice, you tend to mash the “Next” button endlessly as one “chat” after another fails to materialise). This is what Chatroulette looks like – you’ll notice the similarity as we move further into the writeup: ...

It’s been over a year since we first started seeing the familiar Windows XP My Computer page where it appears your drives are being scanned and it reports a bunch of non-existent malware on your computer. Yesterday I was investigating the latest hot news item where there was a FAMU (Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University) sex tape released on the internet and sure enough I found many SEO poisoned links claiming to have the video. Imagine my surprise when I saw the following. ...