The RootLauncher Kit

After providing more insights on the WebAttacker Toolkit and the Nuclear Grabber, in this post I'll discuss the RootLauncher, a release courtesy of the same group behind WebAttacker. Something else worth mentioning is that a large percentage of the sites I'm monitoring are starting to use authentication, and on a trust-basis login access, perhaps it's due to the enormous coverage recent "underground" releases, namely phishing kits etc. got in the mainstream media. Therefore I'm doing my best to get as much information -- and screenshots -- before it dissapears and will blog on these releases as soon as my schedule allows me to. For instance, several months ago you could easily see over 50 publicly available control panels for the WebAttacker toolkit, now there're only several available through Google. The same goes for RootLauncher.

The RootLauncher kit is advertised -- Rusian to English automatic translation -- as follows :

"Just, we can offer you 3-version - D o w n l o a d e r-designed RootLauncher for the hidden load arbitrary WIN32 Exe-faila from a remote resource, followed by the launch of the file on the local hard disk. Obhodit all protection is not determined by any AV-Do not see fairvollah - Flexible settings - Periodic updates and supplements may download up to five exe files. Our team is not at the same point and develops all bolshe-bolshe for you dear friends services available to them closer you will be able to on our official website. We are also looking for people interested in partnership with us."

And while it's supposed to be nothing more then an average downloader, these "average downloaders" are actually starting to standardize features in respect to statistics and compatibility with other toolkits and malicious software.

In a previous post at WebSense's blog, they came across a web panel showing that the "total number of unique launchers is 155" now count these as infected PCs, but as you can see in the image attached, the sample could be much larger. This one I obtained from the following URL : http://www.inthost7.com/cgi-bin/rleadmin.cgi which is of course down, but was listing 1013 launchers already, here's an analysis of this very same URL.

IP cloaking when browing such sites and forums is important in order for you to remain as anonymous as possible. If you're on a Russian site make sure you're a Russian domain, if you're on a Chinese site make sure you're a Chinese domain, and most importantly don't directly translate through Google or Altavista, but copy and paste what's interesting to you so that you wouldn't let someone wonder why would a Russian domain translates a Russian text to English. Imagine the situation where security vendors browse them through their securityvendor.com subdomains, the results will follow shortly -- everything dissapears.

In respect to the WebAttacker, the kit is still widely used but the people using and updating it are starting to prevent Google from crawling and caching the control panels, which makes it harder to keep track of the sites in an OSINT manner -- my modest honeyfarm keeps me informed on URLs of notice though. Here's one of the very few instances of a Web-Attacker Control Panel still available at Google. Here's an analysis of the source code of the Web-Attacker kit as well -- and I thought I'm going full disclosure. More details on various newly released packers, multi-exploit infection toolkits, and standardized statistics with all the screenshots I've managed to obtain will follow next week.

Taking into consideration the big picture -- like you should -- the release and automation of phishing/exploit kits and lowering the entry barriers for script kiddies to generate enough noise to keep the real puppet masters safe, or at lease secretly pull the strings. I'd rather we operate in the time when launching a phishing attack required much more resources than it requires today.

Image Blocking in Email Clients and Web Services

Handy graphs and best practices on the state of default remote image loading in desktop and online email clients -- a problematic issue from a security point of view, and a marketing heaven from an advertising perspective :

"Every client has its own default settings regarding displaying/hiding images. And while most email clients have a setting to turn images on or off, some offer conditional settings which are contingent upon known senders or other factors. The following table outlines the default settings of popular desktop- and webmail-clients."

Sometimes a spam email isn't sent with the idea to trick someone believe into something, but to act as a verification of that email's existence in the form of remote image -- web bug -- loading, and yes it could also act as a redirector to pretty much anything malicious. Go through related posts in case you're interested, and also see a common trade-off image spammers face.

Korean Zombies Behind the Root Servers Attack

More details on the recent DDoS attacks on the DNS root servers emerge, seems like the attacks originated from Sourth Korean infected PCs, but were orchestrated from a host server in Coburn, Germany :

"Citing data from the North American Network Operators' Group, the Korean government confirmed 61 percent of the problematic data was traced to South Korea. Yet, the Ministry of Information and Communication flatly rebuffs the suspicion that Korea was the main culprit behind the cyber attacks. ``We learned a host server in Coburg, Germany ordered a flurry of Korean computers to stage DOS assaults on the root servers,'' said Lee Doo-won, a director at the ministry. ``In other words, Korean computers affected by viruses made raids into the root servers as instructed by the German host server. Many of our computers acted like zombies,'' Lee said."

In a spoofable IPv4 Internet packet's authenticity is the most common flaw exploited on the front lines. The article points out that 61% of the problematic data came from South Korea, and it would be logical to conclude the other 39% came from Chinese and U.S based infected PCs, and while we can argue which country has the largest proportion of insecure end users -- or insecure end users with access to huge bandwidth -- that shouldn't be the point, but how ISPs should start considering how to stop the malicious traffic going out of their networks, compared to their current mindset of outside-to-inside network protection.

A battle lost for the botnet masters in their futile attempt to shut down three of the root servers, and a battle won for South Korea as they will definitely take this wake up call seriously. Meanwhile, S. Korea's CERT offers lots of interesting research reports on the local situation, particularly their latest Internet Incident Trend Report.

Graph courtesy of the ANA Spoofer Project.

The Phishing Ecosystem

Phishing is the efficient case of online social engineering. With the ease of sending phishing emails thanks to malware infected PCs -- spamonomics 101 -- as well as many other techniques for creating the pages and forwarders phishers use to trick users -- it's indisputable how much more profitable phishing is next to spam.

This is perhaps the most detailed summary of the emerging ecosystem I've read in a while. It walks the reader through the process of acquiring the resources for the attack and tracking down the results and provides overview of how malware authors, phishers and spammers work hand to hand due to the pressure put on their actions by the industry and, of course, the countless third-party researchers. Here's a summary :

"- Get an email list
- Develop the attack
- Locate sites to send phishing emails from
- Locate sites to host the phishing site
- Launch the attack
- Collect results"

Around the industry, security researchers are again signalling the ongoing use of popular sites such as MySpace for hosting phishing pages, phishers are going Web 2.0 and starting to use Google Maps, and seems like Castle Cops the anti-phishing community witnessed a demonstration of DDoS bandwidth power which is definitely the result of the consolidated anti-phishing initiative that they manage to keep on expanding. Moreover, yet another evidence of the developing ecosystem is the fact that spam and defaced sites aren't what they used to be, namely are turning into malicious attack vectors. Despite that everyone's claiming the commercialization of this entire ecosystem, hacktivism is not dead!

The "best" is yet to come, and let's hope a more suspicious common sense on the users' part too.