Security

Hello and welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch releases. This is a fairly quiet month—the vendor is releasing two bulletins covering a total of eight vulnerabilities. All of the issues are rated “Important” this month: seven affecting Office/Excel and one affecting Movie Maker and Producer. All of the issues are file-based remote code-execution vulnerabilities in the context of the currently logged-in user. Microsoft also released a security advisory (981374) today regarding a publicly disclosed vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Limited, targeted attacks exploiting this issue have been detected in the wild. ...

Here is yet another example of a company distributing malware to its userbase. Unfortunately it probably won’t be the last. Today one of our colleagues received a brand new Vodafone HTC Magic with Google’s Android OS. “Neat” she said. Vodafone distributes this phone to its userbase in some European countries and it seems affordable as you can get it for 0€ or 1€ under certain conditions. The interesting thing is that when she plugged the phone to her PC via USB her Antivirus went off, detecting both an autorun.inf and autorun.exe as malicious. A quick look into the phone quickly revealed it was infected and spreading the infection to any and all PCs that the phone would be plugged into. ...

Hmmm. A new vector for malware: USB battery chargers. Wonderful. The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is warning that Energizer DUO USB battery chargers have been found infected with a Trojan that loads backdoor malware on a victim PC along with its battery monitoring software. The charger copies a .dll file named UsbCharger.dll in the application’s directory and another named Arucer.dll in the Windows system32 directory. USBCharger sets a registry entry to autoexecute Arucer.dll when Windows starts. ...

There’s an angelically tinged infection doing the rounds at the moment that has more than a whiff of sulphur about it. We can’t say for definite, but it looks like the point of this little angel is to turn your PC into a file storage area for an IRC channel since it dumps you into #music IRC channels and makes sure you can accept various media files. Our tale begins with an Email, claiming you have a “funny picture from Facebook friends” waiting for you at Oast(dot)com: ...

Cybercriminals are attacking bloggers who use Google’s Blogger.com. We have received emails intended for bloggers to update their account. Here’s the snapshot email of the email we have received: The email contains link that will redirect to fake login page of the “Blogger.com”. As seen from the highlighted link, it has a root domain “*.erdca.kr” which is differ from the authentic root domain of blogger.com. The fake login page which is known as phishing site appears to be like this: ...

Sources on a number of forums tell me that a certain application is going to be released into the wild in a few days, promoted heavily via sites such as Youtube to attract as many potential victims as possible. I thought it might be beneficial to get a head start on the bad guys and get word out before they hit their big green “Go” switch. What is it? I believe the following screenshot can answer that question: ...

We frequently read stories about spammers who can circumvent CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) authentication. Using bot-infected machines, they can create a vast number of random e-mail accounts for spamming purposes. This week, a federal judge in Newark, New Jersey, revealed the latest use of a botnet-like network with a CAPTCHA breaker. In this case, the computers overseen by the defendants were used to buy seats for high-profile concerts and sports events from ticket sellers’ websites. The defendents later allegedly resold the tickets on Internet at much higher prices. ...

On Friday evening I was talking to a North American customer who had been fighting with infections caused by SEO poisoning. They mentioned a particular search term that could generate new samples of FakeAVs. The funny thing was that the website hacked by the SEO poisoner was a blog of someone trying to promote legitimate business use of SEO technologies.. If you click on any of the links returned by the search you would be redirected to an Indian site containing this image: ...

We all know Brazilian hackers have mastered the art of creating banking trojans. The Chinese are very fond of password stealers targeting online games. The bad guys do have preferences for what type of malware they are creating based on their geolocation. Well, I found this exploit source code from a domain named kuwait{removed}.com The exploit downloads a file named unek.exe, very well known to be an IRC bot. ...

Somebody is trying to pose as F-Secure. If you see an email like the one below, just ignore it: Before you ask: No, we’ve never heard of “F-Secure HTK4S anti-virus” either.