Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Poisoned Search Queries at Google Video Serving Malware

UPDATE: A recently published article at the Register by John Leyden incorrectly states that "researchers at Trend Micro discovered that around 400,000 queries returning malicious results that lead to a single redirection point" wherease the researchers in question went public with the attack data on the 27th of January, and then again on the 28th of January.

This isn't the first time the Register shows an oudated siatuational awareness, following the two month-old coverage of a proprietary email and personal information harvesting tool, which I extensively covered in between receiving comments from one of the affected sites.

A blackhat SEO-ers group that's been generating bogus link farms ultimately serving malware to their visitors during the past couple of months, has recently started poisoning Google Video search queries and redirecting the traffic to a fake flash player using the PornTube template. (The Template-ization of Malware Serving Sites). Approximately 400,000+ bogus video titles have already been crawled by Google Video.

Instead of sticking to a proven traffic acquisition tactic in the face of adult videos, the campaigns are in fact syndicating the titles of legitimate YouTube videos in order to populate the search results. What's also worth pointing out that is that once they start duplicating the content -- like they're doing with specific titles -- based on their 21 bogus publisher domains, they can easily hijack each and every of the first 21 results for a particular video. The fake flash player redirection is served only when the visitor is coming from Google Video, if he or a researcher isn't based on a simple http referer check, a legitimate YouTube video is served.

Upon clicking on the video from any of their publisher domains, the user is taken to porncowboys .net/continue.php (94.247.2.34) then forwarded do xfucked .org/video.php?genre=babes&id=7375 (94.247.2.34) to have the binary served at trackgame .net/download/FlashPlayer.v3.181.exe and qazextra .com/download/FlashPlayer.v3.181.exe. Detection rate for the flash player.

The malware publisher domains crawled by Google Video redirecting to the bogus flash player :
nudistxxx .net - 22,000 bogus video titles
realsexygirls .net - 21,000 bogus video titles
trulysexy .net - 27,100 bogus video titles
madsexygirls .net - 18,900 bogus video titles
mypornoplace .net - 25,700 bogus video titles
hotcasinoxxx .net - 28,900 bogus video titles
hotgirlstube .net - 37,900 bogus video titles
xgirlplayground .com - 50,600 bogus video titles
puresextube .net - 20,700 bogus video titles
xxxtube4u .com - 11,400 bogus video titles
sexygirlstube .net - 63,100 bogus video titles
xporntube .org - 12,800 bogus video titles
xxxgirls .name - 33,500 bogus video titles
girlyvideos .net - 37,500 bogus video titles
mytubecentral .net - 38,900 bogus video titles
puresextube .net - 20,700 bogus video titles
teencamtube .com - 18,400 bogus video titles
celebtube .org - 41,100 bogus video titles
truexx .com - 16,900 bogus video titles
hottesttube .net - 28,100 bogus video titles
hotgirlsvids .net - 27,200 bogus video titles
watch-music-videos .net - 14,900 bogus video titles
marketvids .net - 29,900 bogus video titles
gamingvids .net - 7,930 bogus video titles
hentaixxx .info - 25,500 bogus video titles

The campaign is currently in a cover-up phrase since discussing it yesterday and notifying Google with all the details. But the potential for abuse remains there. Timeliness vs comphrenesiveness of a malware campaign?

Following this example of comprehensivess, take into consideration the timeliness in the face of October 2008's campaign when hot Google Trends keywords were automatically syndicated in order to hijack search traffic which was then redirected to several hundred automatically registered Windows Live blogs whose high pagerank made it possible for the blogs to appear within the first 5 results.

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