Security

As was announced on Dec 11th, CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) now requires a “formal paper based application material when making the online application to the registrar.” The motivation behind this seems more related to cracking down on porn sites, but since .cn domains have been the call-to-action in 35-50% of all spam being sent for well over a year, we were wondering what effect this policy change may have on the prevalence of this TLD in spam. The graph below illustrates the percentage of spam messages sent each day that contain a .cn domain (vast majority are Canadian Pharmacy type spam) as well as the percentage of pharmacy spam messages sent that contain a link to a free webhosting service (blue). I decided to measure the .cn abuse, against free webhosting abuse, as the same Canadian Pharmacy spam that contained links to .cn domains for the past few months, now contain links to a number of free webhosting services instead. The CNNIC changes started to be applied on December 14th. ...

Earlier in 2009, the Microsoft privacy homepage became the target of rogue security software developers looking to make a fast buck. The developers of the rogue security application known as “Privacy Center” even went so far as to include a link to Microsoft to trick users into thinking the rogue is a Microsoft product. Trojan:Win32/PrivacyCenter is a family of programs that claims to scan for malware and displays fake warnings of “malicious programs and viruses”. They then inform the user that they need to pay money to register the software in order to remove these non-existent threats. ...

Twitter, one of the Internets most popular social networking sites, has been hacked and defaced by a group claiming to be an “Iranian Cyber Army” as of 10:15PM PST today. At this point no statement has been made by Twitter, so it’s unclear as to what vulnerability was used to exploit the site. Oftentimes hacktivism campaigns are fueled by ego-driven script kiddies who use publicly available exploits, but for now we’ll have to wait and see if Twitter decides to publicly announce the details surrounding the attack. The defacement has been removed and Twitter is back up and running as of 11:20 PM PST. ...

For the first time, the FBI has issued a public warning about the threat of rogue anti-virus software, which the agency said has resulted in more than $150 million in losses to victims. In an intelligence note posted Friday on the website of the Internet Crime Complaint Center, the FBI said users should be on the lookout for pop-up advertisements masking as legitimate-looking AV software, known as “rogueware” or “scareware.” Rogue anti-virus software typically is purveyed through malicious advertisements, or “malvertisements,” on trusted websites. When viewed or clicked, the ads lead users to sites that claim their computer is infected and, to resolve the issue, they should buy an anti-virus product, which turns out to be fake. In other instances, the ads try to install trojans onto the victim’s PC. ...

Another Clone of WiniGuard family, SysDefence! went live about 3 hours ago. They’re flying off the conveyor belt today. The GUI is identical to TheDefend except the name.

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. ...

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 ...