More High Profile Sites IFRAME Injected

The ongoing monitoring of this campaign reveals that the group is continuing to expand the campaign, introducing over a hundred new bogus .info domains acting as traffic redirection points to the campaigns hardcoded within the secondary redirection point, in this case radt.info where a new malware variant of Zlob is attempting to install though an ActiveX object. These are the high profile sites targeted by the same group within the past 48 hours, with number of locally cached and IFRAME injected pages within their search engines :

NCSU Libraries - lib.ncsu.edu - 372,000 pages
FullDownloads.us - fulldownloads.us - 13,000 pages
Central Statistics Office Ireland - cso.ie - 10,300 pages
DBLife Frontpage - dblife.cs.wisc.edu - 1,130 pages
School of Mathematics and Statistics - www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk - 1040 pages
eHawaii Portal - ehawaii.gov - 992 pages
The World Clock - timeanddate.com - 944 pages
Boise State University - boisestate.edu - 471 pages
The U.S. Administration on Aging (AoA) - aoa.gov - 425 pages
Gustavus Adolphus College - gustavus.edu - 312 pages
Internet Archive - archive.org - 261 pages
Stanford Business School Alumni Association - gsbapps.stanford.edu - 157 pages
BushTorrent - bushtorrent.com - 147 pages
ChildCareExchange - ccie.com - 131 pages
The University of Vermont - uvm.edu - 120 pages
Hippodrome State Theatre - Gainesville, FL - thehipp.org - 112 pages
Minnesota State University Mankato - mnsu.edu - 94 pages
The California Majority Report - camajorityreport.com - 16 pages
Medicare.gov - medicare.gov - 12 pages
USAMRIID - usamriid.army.mil - 3 pages

This sample of the newly introduced .info domains reside on the same netblock as the previous ones - 75.125.181.0/255 a KISS strategy making it easier to respond to this incident. Best of all, they further expand the campaign since they're injected in plain text, next to javascript obfuscated, this time embedded malware :

hickey.info

kbst.info

sezejc.info

mloqrd.info

mqghrd.info

ymrxwd.info

fsqpsm.info

haxkwd.info

aagpcw.info

zdksgj.info

cgjttz.info

hkedny.info

kbsxet.info

wapdjw.info

kbsxet.info

tdwham.info

mqghrd.info

dhqjdz.info

bhrsaa.info

jramae.info

wmtwes.info

tacpmh.info

qwhhxq.info

gmjett.info

hkedny.info

rerkqz.info
bhrsaa.info

txmwxb.info

psyckr.info

jramae.info

nhwdrh.info

cqqxkh.info

stysqf.info

tgzyqz.info

kbsxet.info

cgjttz.info

tazbhk.info

kbsxet.info

Each of the these is loading a secondary domain, which is then taking us to two more before finally reaching the Zlob variant. In this case it's radt.info (75.125.208.243) with several campaigns currently up and running, pointing to the same fake codec. And the samples redirects upon visiting these as follows :

seivomerutam.info/Free-Paris-Hilton-Nude-Pics/
seivomerutam.info/spam/

all of which ultimately redirect to :

porn-popular.com (64.28.185.78) where the Zlob variant in the face of a fake codec, is downloaded from democodec.com/download/ democodec1292.exe (64.28.184.168) via an Active X object.

Scanner results : 22% Scanner(8/36) found malware!

File Name : democodec1292.exe

File Size : 74823 byte

MD5 : 30965fdbd893990dd24abda2285d9edc

SHA1 : 53eacbb9cdf42394bd455d9bd2275f05730332f7

Downloader.Zlob.ZV; Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Zlob.eie; TrojanDownloader.Zlob.epx

It gets even more interesting as according to Computer Associates :

"This fake codec is actually a hijacker that will change your DNS settings whether you are aquire your IP settings through DHCP or set your IP information manually. This hijacker will attempt to re-route all your DNS queries through 85.255.x.29 or 85.255.x.121. If you use a static IP address, CA AntiSpyware will set your DNS server to 198.6.1.1 to prevent your DNS queries from continuing to go through the rogue DNS servers. Please change your DNS server to the DNS server provided by your IP or Network Administrator."

What this means is that known Russian Business Network netblocks are receiving all the re-routed DNS queries from infected hosts, thereby setting up the foundations for a large scale pharming attack by infecting the weakest link, the end user from the perspective of using rogue DNS servers, a much more effective but noisy approach.

To sum up - it's a mess that I'll continue trying to structure, and it's a single group exploiting input validation capability within the sites' search engines we're talking about. With this segmented targeting of sites with high page ranks, and their persistance, is already positioning hundreds of thousands of keywords within the top search results, with the targeted sites are acting as the redirectors to the malware locations.