Tuesday, November 27, 2007

A TrustedSource for Threats Intell Data

Following the series of posts on early warning security events systems, Secure Computing have just announced a major upgrade of their threat intell service :

"Secure Computing's TrustedSource acts like a satellite advanced-warning system for the Internet that detects suspicious behavior patterns at their origins, and then instructs security devices to take corrective precautions or action," said Dr. Phyllis Schneck, vice president of research integration for Secure Computing. "TrustedSource pinpoints reputation by looking at behavior and specific factors such as traffic volumes, patterns and trends, and enabling it to rapidly identify deviations from the norm on a minute-by-minute basis."

I've already mentioned the radical perspective of integrating all the publicly known IPs with bad reputation, and sort of ignoring their online activities in order to prevent common problems such as click fraud for instance. Think from the end user's perspective, what's the worst thing that could happen to both the average and experienced end user? Try witnessing the situation when a known to be infected with malware end user starts receiving messages like these, and will continue to receive them until a certain action is taken presumably disinfecting themselves. Of course, it's more complex than it sounds, but start from the basics in terms of the incentives for end users to disinfect themselves, the masses of which aren't that very socially oriented unless of course it's global warming and the possibility for a white Christmas you're talking about. Issuing an "Internet Driver's License" wouldn't work on an international scale, and even if it works on a local scale somewhere in the world, it wouldn't really matter, since you'll have the rest of the world driving unsafely, and you'll be the only country which has fastened its seat belt. Here's an example of such mode of thinking.

Are You Botnet-ing With Me?

Informative and recently released study by ENISA on the problem of botnets, especially the emphasis on how client side vulnerabilities surpassed email attachments, and downloading of infected files as infection vectors. Not because these aren't working, but because of the botnet's masters attitude for achieving malicious economies of scale has changed. Despite that we can question whether or not they put so much efforts while strategizing this, let's say they stopped pushing malware, and started coming up with ways for the end users to pull it for themselves :

"The most common infection methods are browser exploits (65%), email attachments (13%,) operating system exploits (11%), and downloaded Internet files (9%). Currently, the most dangerous infection method is surfing to an infected webpage. Indications of a bot on your computer include e.g.: Slow Internet connection, strange browser behavior (home page change, new windows, unknown plug-ins), disabled anti-virus software; unknown autostart programs etc."

Here's the entire publication - "Botnets - The Silent Threat" by David Barroso.

I See Alive IFRAMEs Everywhere - Part Two

The never ending IFRAME-ing of relatively popular or niche domains whose popularity is attracting loyal and well segmented audience, never ends. Which leads us to part two of this series uncovering such domains and tracing back the malicious campaign to the very end of it. Some of these are still IFRAME-ed, others cleaned the IFRAMEs despite Google's warning indicating they're still harmful, the point is that all of these are connected.

Affected sites :

Epilepsie France - epilepsie-france.org
Iran Art News - iranartnews.com
The Media Women Forum - yfmf.org
Le Bowling en France - bowling-france.fr
The Hong Kong Physiotherapists Union - hkpu.org
The Wireless LAN Community - wlan.org
The First HELLENIC Linux Distribution - zeuslinux.gr

The entire campaign is orbiting around pornopervoi.com, which was last responding to 81.177.3.225, an IP that's also known to be hosting a fake bank (weiterweg-intl.com) according to Artists Against 419. Within the domain, there were small files loading a second IFRAME. For instance, pornopervoi.com/u.php leads to 88.255.94.246/freehost1/georg/index.php?id=0290 (WebAttacker), the same campaign is also active at 81.29.241.238/freehost1/georg/index.php?id=0290, these try to drop the following :

88.255.94.246/freehost1/chris0039/lu/dm_0039.exe
81.29.241.238/freehost1/chris0031/lu/dm_0031.exe

An Apophis C&C panel was located in this ecosystem as well. Among the other files at pornopervoi.com, are pornopervoi.com/i.php where we're redirected to the second one spelredeadread.com/in.php?adv=678. Even more interesting, energy.org.ru a Web hosting provider is also embedded with pornopervoi.com/m.php again forwarding to spelredeadread.com. To further expand this ecosystem, yfmf.org the Media Women Forum is also IFRAME-ed with a link pointing to pornopervoi.com/m.php. Another site that's also pointing to pornopervoi.com/m.php is the Hong Kong Physiotherapists Union hkpu.org. Two more sites serving malware, namely wlan.org, the Wireless LAN Community also pointing to pornopervoi.com/m.php, and zeuslinux.gr, The First HELLENIC Linux Distribution.

Who's behind this malware embedded attack? It's the ongoing consolidation between defacers, malware authors, and blackhat SEO-ers using the infamous infrastructure of the RBN.

Related posts:
Bank of India Serving Malware
U.S Consulate in St.Petersburg Serving Malware
Syrian Embassy in London Serving Malware
CISRT Serving Malware
Compromised Sites Serving Malware and Spam
A Portfolio of Malware Embedded Magazines
Possibility Media's Malware Fiasco
The "New Media" Malware Gang
Another Massive Embedded Malware Attack