"Responsible Behavior"
This one is pretty funny, too.
Entries Tagged "malware"
Page 40 of 49
Is Sears Engaging in Criminal Hacking Behavior?
Join “My SHC Community” on Sears.com, and the company will install some pretty impressive spyware on your computer:
Sears.com is distributing spyware that tracks all your Internet usage – including banking logins, email, and all other forms of Internet usage – all in the name of “community participation.” Every website visitor that joins the Sears community installs software that acts as a proxy to every web transaction made on the compromised computer. In other words, if you have installed Sears software (“the proxy”) on your system, all data transmitted to and from your system will be intercepted. This extreme level of user tracking is done with little and inconspicuous notice about the true nature of the software. In fact, while registering to join the “community,” very little mention is made of software or tracking. Furthermore, after the software is installed, there is no indication on the desktop that the proxy exists on the system, so users are tracked silently.
Here is a summary of what the software does and how it is used. The proxy:
- Monitors and transmits a copy of all Internet traffic going from and coming to the compromised system.
- Monitors secure sessions (websites beginning with ‘https’), which may include shopping or banking sites.
- Records and transmits “the pace and style with which you enter information online…”
- Parses the header section of personal emails.
- May combine any data intercepted with additional information like “select credit bureau information” and other sources like “consumer preference reporting companies or credit reporting agencies”.
If a kid with a scary hacker name did this sort of thing, he’d be arrested. But this is Sears, so who knows what will happen to them. But what should happen is that the anti-spyware companies should treat this as the malware it is, and not ignore it because it’s done by a Fortune 500 company.
The Cybercrime Economy
Interesting article:
While standard commercial software vendors sell software as a service, malware vendors sell malware as a service, which is advertised and distributed like standard software. Communicating via internet relay chat (IRC) and forums, hackers advertise Iframe exploits, pop-unders, click fraud, posting and spam. “If you don’t have it, you can rent it here,” boasts one post, which also offers online video tutorials. Prices for services vary by as much as 100-200 percent across sites, while prices for non-Russian sites are often higher: “If you want the discount rate, buy via Russian sites,” says Genes.
In March the price quoted on malware sites for the Gozi Trojan, which steals data and sends it to hackers in an encrypted form, was between $1,000 (£500) and $2,000 for the basic version. Buyers could purchase add-on services at varying prices starting at $20.
This kind of thing is also discussed here.
The Nugache Worm/Botnet
I’ve already written about the Storm worm, and how it represents a new generation of worm/botnets. And Scott Berinato has written an excellent article about the Gozi worm, another new-generation worm/botnet.
This article is about yet another new-generation worm-botnet: Nugache. Dave Dittrich thinks this is the most advanced worm/botnet yet:
But this new piece of malware, which came to be known as Nugache, was a game-changer. With no C&C server to target, bots capable of sending encrypted packets and the possibility of any peer on the network suddenly becoming the de facto leader of the botnet, Nugache, Dittrich knew, would be virtually impossible to stop.
[…]
Nugache, and its more famous cousin, the Storm Trojan, are not simply the next step in the evolution of malware. They represent a major step forward in both the quality of software that malware authors are producing and in the sophistication of their tactics. Although they’re often referred to as worms, Storm and Nugache are actually Trojans. The Storm creator, for example, sends out millions of spam messages on a semi-regular basis, each containing a link to content on some remote server, normally disguised in a fake pitch for a penny stock, Viagra or relief for victims of a recent natural disaster. When a user clicks on the link, the attacker’s server installs the Storm Trojan on the user’s PC and it’s off and running.
Various worms, viruses, bots and Trojans over the years have had one or two of the features that Storm, Nugache, Rbot and other such programs possess, but none has approached the breadth and depth of their feature sets. Rbot, for example, has more than 100 features that users can choose from when compiling the bot. This means that two different bots compiled from an identical source could have nearly identical feature sets, yet look completely different to an antivirus engine.
[…]
As scary as Storm and Nugache are, the scarier thing is that they represent just the tip of the iceberg. Experts say that there are several malware groups out there right now that are writing custom Trojans, rootkits and attack toolkits to the specifications of their customers. The customers are in turn using the malware not to build worldwide botnets a la Storm, but to attack small slices of a certain industry, such as financial services or health care.
Rizo, a variant of the venerable Rbot, is the poster child for this kind of attack. A Trojan in the style of Nugache and Storm, Rizo has been modified a number of times to meet the requirements of various different attack scenarios. Within the course of a few weeks, different versions of Rizo were used to attack customers of several different banks in South America. Once installed on a user’s PC, it monitors Internet activity and gathers login credentials for online banking sites, which it then sends back to the attacker. It’s standard behavior for these kinds of Trojans, but the amount of specificity and customization involved in the code and the ways in which the author changed it over time are what have researchers worried.
[…]
“I’m pretty sure that there are tactics being shared between the Nugache and Storm authors,” Dittrich said. “There’s a direct lineage from Sdbot to Rbot to Mytob to Bancos. These guys can just sell the Web front-end to these things and the customers can pick their options and then just hit go.”
See also: “Command and control structures in malware: From Handler/Agent to P2P,” by Dave Dittrich and Sven Dietrich, USENIX ;login:, vol. 32, no. 6, December 2007, and “Analysis of the Storm and Nugache Trojans: P2P is here,” Sam Stover, Dave Dittrich, John Hernandez, and Sven Dietrich, USENIX ;login:, vol. 32, no. 6, December 2007. The second link is available to USENIX members only, unfortunately.
MI5 Sounds Alarm on Internet Spying from China
Someone in MI5 is pissed off at China:
In an unprecedented alert, the Director-General of MI5 sent a confidential letter to 300 chief executives and security chiefs at banks, accountants and legal firms this week warning them that they were under attack from “Chinese state organisations.”
[…]
Firms known to have been compromised recently by Chinese attacks are one of Europe’s largest engineering companies and a large oil company, The Times has learnt. Another source familiar with the MI5 warning said, however, that known attacks had not been limited to large firms based in the City of London. Law firms and other businesses in the regions that deal even with only small parts of Chinese-linked deals are being probed as potential weak spots, he said.
A security expert who has also seen the letter said that among the techniques used by Chinese groups were “custom Trojans”, software designed to hack into the network of a particular firm and feed back confidential data. The MI5 letter includes a list of known “signatures” that can be used to identify Chinese Trojans and a list of internet addresses known to have been used to launch attacks.
A big study gave warning this week that Government and military computer systems in Britain are coming under sustained attack from China and other countries. It followed a report presented to the US Congress last month describing Chinese espionage in the US as so extensive that it represented “the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies.”
EDITED TO ADD (12/13): The Onion comments.
EDITED TO ADD (12/14): At first, I thought that someone in MI5 was pissed off at China. But now I think that someone in MI5 was pissed that he wasn’t getting any budget.
Hard Drives Sold with Pre-Installed Trojans
I don’t know if this story is true:
Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.
Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.
The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner’s knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org, the bureau said.
Certainly possible.
EDITED TO ADD (12/14): A first-hand account.
Future of Malware
Excellent three–part series on trends in criminal malware:
When Jackson logged in, the genius of 76service became immediately clear. 76service customers weren’t weren’t paying for already-stolen credentials. Instead, 76service sold subscriptions or “projects” to Gozi-infected machines. Usually, projects were sold in 30-day increments because that’s a billing cycle, enough time to guarantee that the person who owns the machine with Gozi on it will have logged in to manage their finances, entering data into forms that could be grabbed.
Subscribers could log in with their assigned user name and password any time during the 30-day project. They’d be met with a screen that told them which of their bots was currently active, and a side bar of management options. For example, they could pull down the latest drops—data deposits that the Gozi-infected machines they subscribed to sent to the servers, like the 3.3 GB one Jackson had found.
A project was like an investment portfolio. Individual Gozi-infected machines were like stocks and subscribers bought a group of them, betting they could gain enough personal information from their portfolio of infected machines to make a profit, mostly by turning around and selling credentials on the black market. (In some cases, subscribers would use a few of the credentials themselves).
Some machines, like some stocks, would under perform and provide little private information. But others would land the subscriber a windfall of private data. The point was to subscribe to several infected machines to balance that risk, the way Wall Street fund managers invest in many stocks to offset losses in one company with gains in another.
[…]
That’s why the subscription prices were steep. “Prices started at $1,000 per machine per project,” says Jackson. With some tinkering and thanks to some loose database configuration, Jackson gained a view into other people’s accounts. He mostly saw subscriptions that bought access to only a handful of machines, rarely more than a dozen.
The $1K figure was for “fresh bots”—new infections that hadn’t been part of a project yet. Used bots that were coming off an expired project were available, but worth less (and thus, cost less) because of the increased likelihood that personal information gained from that machine had already been sold. Customers were urged to act quickly to get the freshest bots available.
This was another advantage for the seller. Providing the self-service interface freed up the sellers to create ancillary services. 76service was extremely customer-focused. “They were there to give you services that made it a good experience,” Jackson says. You want us to clean up the reports for you? Sure, for a small fee. You want a report on all the credentials from one bank in your drop? Hundred bucks, please. For another $150 a month, we’ll create secure remote drops for you. Alternative packaging and delivery options? We can do that. Nickel and dime. Nickel and dime.
And about banks not caring:
As much as the HangUp Team has relied on distributed pain for its success, financial institutions have relied on transferred risk to keep the Internet crime problem from becoming a consumer cause and damaging their businesses. So far, it has been cheaper to follow regulations enough to pass audits and then pay for the fraud rather than implement more serious security. “If you look at the volume of loss versus revenue, it’s not horribly bad yet,” says Chris Hoff, with a nod to the criminal hacker’s strategy of distributed pain. “The banks say, ‘Regulations say I need to do these seven things, so I do them and let’s hope the technology to defend against this catches up.'”
“John” the security executive at the bank, one of the only security professionals from financial services who agreed to speak for this story, says “If you audited a financial institution, you wouldn’t find many out of compliance. From a legal perspective, banks can spin that around and say there’s nothing else we could do.”
The banks know how much data Lance James at Secure Science is monitoring; some of them are his clients. The researcher with expertise on the HangUp Team calls consumers’ ability to transfer funds online “the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. You can’t walk into the branch of a bank with a mask on and no ID and make a transfer. So why is it okay online?”
And yet banks push online banking to customers with one hand while the other hand pushes problems like Gozi away, into acceptable loss budgets and insurance—transferred risk.
As long as consumers don’t raise a fuss, and thus far they haven’t in any meaningful way, the banks have little to fear from their strategies.
But perhaps the only reason consumers don’t raise a fuss is because the banks have both overstated the safety and security of online banking and downplayed negative events around it, like the existence of Gozi and 76service.
The whole thing is worth reading.
The Storm Worm
The Storm worm first appeared at the beginning of the year, hiding in e-mail attachments with the subject line: “230 dead as storm batters Europe.” Those who opened the attachment became infected, their computers joining an ever-growing botnet.
Although it’s most commonly called a worm, Storm is really more: a worm, a Trojan horse and a bot all rolled into one. It’s also the most successful example we have of a new breed of worm, and I’ve seen estimates that between 1 million and 50 million computers have been infected worldwide.
Old style worms—Sasser, Slammer, Nimda—were written by hackers looking for fame. They spread as quickly as possible (Slammer infected 75,000 computers in 10 minutes) and garnered a lot of notice in the process. The onslaught made it easier for security experts to detect the attack, but required a quick response by antivirus companies, sysadmins and users hoping to contain it. Think of this type of worm as an infectious disease that shows immediate symptoms.
Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.
Storm represents the future of malware. Let’s look at its behavior:
- Storm is patient. A worm that attacks all the time is much easier to detect; a worm that attacks and then shuts off for a while hides much more easily.
- Storm is designed like an ant colony, with separation of duties. Only a small fraction of infected hosts spread the worm. A much smaller fraction are C2: command-and-control servers. The rest stand by to receive orders. By only allowing a small number of hosts to propagate the virus and act as command-and-control servers, Storm is resilient against attack. Even if those hosts shut down, the network remains largely intact, and other hosts can take over those duties.
- Storm doesn’t cause any damage, or noticeable performance impact, to the hosts. Like a parasite, it needs its host to be intact and healthy for its own survival. This makes it harder to detect, because users and network administrators won’t notice any abnormal behavior most of the time.
- Rather than having all hosts communicate to a central server or set of servers, Storm uses a peer-to-peer network for C2. This makes the Storm botnet much harder to disable. The most common way to disable a botnet is to shut down the centralized control point. Storm doesn’t have a centralized control point, and thus can’t be shut down that way.
This technique has other advantages, too. Companies that monitor net activity can detect traffic anomalies with a centralized C2 point, but distributed C2 doesn’t show up as a spike. Communications are much harder to detect.
One standard method of tracking root C2 servers is to put an infected host through a memory debugger and figure out where its orders are coming from. This won’t work with Storm: An infected host may only know about a small fraction of infected hosts—25-30 at a time—and those hosts are an unknown number of hops away from the primary C2 servers.
And even if a C2 node is taken down, the system doesn’t suffer. Like a hydra with many heads, Storm’s C2 structure is distributed.
- Not only are the C2 servers distributed, but they also hide behind a constantly changing DNS technique called “fast flux.” So even if a compromised host is isolated and debugged, and a C2 server identified through the cloud, by that time it may no longer be active.
- Storm’s payload—the code it uses to spread—morphs every 30 minutes or so, making typical AV (antivirus) and IDS techniques less effective.
- Storm’s delivery mechanism also changes regularly. Storm started out as PDF spam, then its programmers started using e-cards and YouTube invites—anything to entice users to click on a phony link. Storm also started posting blog-comment spam, again trying to trick viewers into clicking infected links. While these sorts of things are pretty standard worm tactics, it does highlight how Storm is constantly shifting at all levels.
- The Storm e-mail also changes all the time, leveraging social engineering techniques. There are always new subject lines and new enticing text: “A killer at 11, he’s free at 21 and …,” “football tracking program” on NFL opening weekend, and major storm and hurricane warnings. Storm’s programmers are very good at preying on human nature.
- Last month, Storm began attacking anti-spam sites focused on identifying it—spamhaus.org, 419eater and so on—and the personal website of Joe Stewart, who published an analysis of Storm. I am reminded of a basic theory of war: Take out your enemy’s reconnaissance. Or a basic theory of urban gangs and some governments: Make sure others know not to mess with you.
Not that we really have any idea how to mess with Storm. Storm has been around for almost a year, and the antivirus companies are pretty much powerless to do anything about it. Inoculating infected machines individually is simply not going to work, and I can’t imagine forcing ISPs to quarantine infected hosts. A quarantine wouldn’t work in any case: Storm’s creators could easily design another worm—and we know that users can’t keep themselves from clicking on enticing attachments and links.
Redesigning the Microsoft Windows operating system would work, but that’s ridiculous to even suggest. Creating a counterworm would make a great piece of fiction, but it’s a really bad idea in real life. We simply don’t know how to stop Storm, except to find the people controlling it and arrest them.
Unfortunately we have no idea who controls Storm, although there’s some speculation that they’re Russian. The programmers are obviously very skilled, and they’re continuing to work on their creation.
Oddly enough, Storm isn’t doing much, so far, except gathering strength. Aside from continuing to infect other Windows machines and attacking particular sites that are attacking it, Storm has only been implicated in some pump-and-dump stock scams. There are rumors that Storm is leased out to other criminal groups. Other than that, nothing.
Personally, I’m worried about what Storm’s creators are planning for Phase II.
This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
EDITED TO ADD (10/17): Storm is being partitioned, presumably so parts can be sold off. If that’s true, we should expect more malicious activitity out of Storm in the future; anyone buying a botnet will want to use it.
Slashdot thread on Storm.
EDITEDT TO ADD (10/22): Here’s research that suggests Storm is shinking.
EDITED T OADD (10/24): Another article about Storm striking back at security researchers.
"Cyber Crime Toolkits" Hit the News
On the BBC website:
“They are starting to pop up left and right,” said Tim Eades from security company Sana, of the sites offering downloadable hacking tools. “It’s the classic verticalisation of a market as it starts to mature.”
Malicious hackers had evolved over the last few years, he said, and were now selling the tools they used to use to the growing numbers of fledgling cyber thieves.
Mr Eades said some hacking groups offer boutique virus writing services that produce malicious programs that security software will not spot. Individual malicious programs cost up to £17 (25 euros), he said.
At the top end of the scale, said Mr Eades, were tools like the notorious MPack which costs up to £500.
The regular updates for the software ensure it uses the latest vulnerabilities to help criminals hijack PCs via booby-trapped webpages. It also includes a statistical package that lets owners know how successful their attack has been and where victims are based.
In one sense, there’s nothing new here. There have been rootkits and virus construction kits available on the Internet for years. The very definition of a “script kiddie” is someone who uses these tools without really understanding them. What is new is the market: these new tools aren’t for wannabe hackers, they’re for criminals. And with the new market comes a for-profit business model.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.