Pushdo - Web Based Malware as Usual

Interesting assessment, especially the explanation of the GET variables, however, such descriptive use of POST variables to a malware's C&C server have been around for the last couple of years. What has logically changed is the added layer of obfuscation and complexity to make it hard to assess what does such a URL actually mean :

"The malware to be downloaded by Pushdo depends on the value following the "s-underscore" part of the URL. The Pushdo controller is preloaded with multiple executable files - the one we looked at contained 421 different malware samples ready to be delivered. The Pushdo controller also uses the GeoIP geolocation database in conjunction with whitelists and blacklists of country codes. This enables the Pushdo author to limit distribution of any one of the malware loads from infecting users located in a particular country, or provides the ability to target a specfic country or countries with a specific payload."

This is an excerpt from a previous post on "Botnet Communication Platforms" including various graphs courtesy of botnet masters circa 2004/2005 :

"The possiblities with PHP and MySQL in respect to flexibility of the statistics, layered encryption and tunneling, and most importantly, decentralizing the command even improving authentication with port knocking are countless. Besides, with all the buzz of botnets continuing to use IRC, it's a rather logical move for botnet masters to shift to other platforms, where communicating in between HTTP's noise improves their chance of remaining undetected. Rather ironic, the author warns of possible SQL injection vulnerabilities in the botnet's command panel."

Here're some C&C IPs related to Pushdo :

208.66.195.71

208.66.194.242

66.246.252.215

66.246.252.213

66.246.72.173

67.18.114.98

74.53.42.34

74.53.42.61

talkely.com

Talkely.com (217.14.132.178) is also responding to arenatalk.net and worldtalk.net. There's also another bogus message next to the one mentioned in SecureWorks analysis - and it's "Under Construction Try google".

Related posts on Web Based Malware :

The Nuclear Malware Kit

The Cyber Bot

The Black Sun Bot

Cyber Jihadist Hacking Teams

These groups and fractions of religiously brainwashed IT enthusiasts utilizing outdated ping and HTTP GET flooding attack tools, represent today's greatly overhyped threat possed by the cyber jihadists whose cheap PSYOPS dominate, given the lack of strategical thinking, and the lack of sustainable communication channels between them, ruined all of their Electronic Jihad campaigns so far. Religious fundamentalism by itself evolves into religious fanaticism, and with the indoviduals in a desperate psychological need for a belonging to a cause, ends up in one of the oldest and easiest methods for recruitment - the one based on religious beliefs.

The teams, and the lone gunmen cyber jihadists in this post are : Osama Bin Laden's Hacking Crew, Ansar AL-Jihad Hackers Team, HaCKErS aLAnSaR, The Designer - Islamic HaCKEr and Alansar Fantom. None of these are known to have any kind of direct relationships with terrorist groups, therefore they should be considered as terrorist sympathizers.

_Osama Bin Laden's Hacking Crew
OBL's Hacking Crew are anything but cheap PSYOPsers trying to teke advantage of outdated conversational marketing approaches to recruit more members, for what yet remains unknown given the lack of any kind of structured formulation of their long-term objectives. They're also promoting the buzz word "E-MUJAHID" to summarize all the possible taska and objectives one would have. This is how they define E-JIHAD :

"JIHAD is the term used for struggle against evil. Electronic jihad or simply, E-JIHAD, is the jihad in cyberspace against all the propagandas and false allegations against the message of truth. E-JIHAD is the struggle in cyber space against all false and evil disciplines, ideology and forces of evil. Have you ever think what is the need of army? To defend the freedom and liberty of a territory and defend it from the attacks of evil intruders. similarly , E-jihad is the battle in the field of cyber space, against all false believes, and to defend the truth against the false and mean propagandas and cults. It is as necessary as a regular army, to defend the ideological borders of a nation. It is said, “ it is not the gun, it is man behind the gun “. Do you ever think what makes a “man “? Nothing, but just the faith and ideology. Without faith and ideology, there is no man and definitely , we then have gun , but without any man ."

These are the tips provided for "defending the ideological borders" :

- They have created anti-Islamic web sites, which are full of everything except the truth. They are full of mean and vulgar allegations against our HOLY QURA’AN, HOLY PROPHAT MOHAMMAD (PEACE BE UPON HIM) and our teachings. We must defend our teachings and fight against the evils. We have to create Islamic web sites, eGroups, Forums, Message boards, & we must support our Mujahideen brothers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Kashmir and elsewhere.

- Many non-Muslims specially jews, Christians and hindus are working in different web groups and communities (like yahoo groups and msn communities) and spreading propaganda against us Muslims. There is a strong need to join such groups and try to refute them. At the moment, the cyber space is free of their opponents. Try to join and refute them, defend your HOLY TEACHINGS OF ISLAM and bring before everyone, nothing but just the truth.

- One of the most dangerous enemies is those who impersonate themselves as a Muslims but they are not Muslims infact. They are Islamic cults. They are usually qadyanis/ahmadis/mirzais and bahais. some are jews and christians. They are all non Muslims but they impersonate as a Muslim and try to misguide others. They are spreading non-Islamic believes. It needs to be taken care of, we have to fight them. Otherwise, you can imagine how disastrous this situation can be for Muslims. These culprit groups even tried to spread a copy of their teachings in the name of HOLY QURA’ AN. but ALLAH has promised that HE will keep HOLY QURA’AN preserved. That’s why, their attempt failed. What is our job? We must fight with these muslim cults and have to tell others the difference between Muslims and muslims cults.

- You can even make your own groups and communities to send mails having Muslim news and Islamic teachings. It is a time convenient method because if you have 500 members in your group, by sending a single mail in the group, your message will be in the inboxes of 500 users, and it takes hardly 1-2 minutes. Isn’t it a time saving technique?

- Many non-Muslim specially Americans, Israelis and Indian hackers always attack our web sites, which are refuting their falsehood and spreading the truth of Islam, the truth that is the only reality. To defend us against such “satanic groups “, we have to organize teamwork, consists of team of Muslim Hackers. Diamond cuts a diamond, to fight with hackers, we need hackers who will defend our sites and make it sure to convey uninterrupted messages to refute the evil and to spread the truth.

_Ansar AL-Jihad Hackers Team and HaCKErS aLAnSaR

Both of these are actually the same, and the group's popularity comes from the al-jinan.net and the al-jinan.org Electronic Jihad campaigns, yes, the failed ones. The original message from Al-jinan's first campaign back in 2006 :

Objective : Will be updated automatically in the main program and the extra room in the conversation. Date : Saturday, 26 /8/2006 - Hours are from 6 pm to 10 Mecca Time - Jerusalem-Cairo. From 3 pm until 7 Time 05:00 Enter chat http: al-jinan.org/chat. Will work only half an hour before the attack. Leadership decided to use only the major programme in the attack, Lltali follows : The programme operates in the same manner but more strongly Durrah, Member faced many problems in the modernization Durra because of their Alcockez, and the present quality, The programme is designed to automatically update speeds.

Their "pitch" :

"We note that our enemies Zionists have such groups in order to eliminate sites and sites of resistance Islamic profess. The notes on the Internet that many of the sites Mujahideen are taking place and the closure of sites and this immoral act of brotherhood pigs. Under such a senseless war on Lebanon and Palestine, the Zionists any target in any area. The factors that are responsible for targeting this will affect them and Ihabtahm and create terror in the hearts of God."

_The Designer - Islamic HaCKEr

A defacer going by the handle of The Designer - Islamic HaCKEr was a vivid hacktivist for a while, than switched handles and continued to deface spreading cyber jihadist PSYOPS such as the following message courtesy of one of his defacements :

"Muslims are not Terrorists and U.S.A & Israel & europa are Terrorists. america and israel and europa they terrorists and we moslems not is terrorists . and It was hacked because you are supporting the war in Iraq, palestine and Afghanistan, and it was hacked because you are killing our people and our kids in Iraq, palestine and Afghanistan , and It was hacked because they invaders our land and they vandals our homes and hacked your sites is our solution."

_Alansar Fantom

In direct coordination with The Designer and Al-Ansar Hackers Team, basically a low-profile script kiddie that's also involved in spreading the campaign message and the flood tools to be used in eh Electrnic Jihad campaign.

Offensive cyber terrorism on behalf of terrorists in the sense of cyber mujahideens is overhyped if they're to do it on their own given the factual based evidence of their current state of technical know-how, with the Electronic Jihad program among the most recent such overhyped threats. Defensive cyber terrorism as an extension of cyber jihad in an asymmetric nature, is what is going on online for the time being, and has been going on for the last couple of years.

The bottom line, script kiddies cyber jihadists dominate, PSYOPS fill the gaps where there's zero technical know-how, mentors are slowly emerging and providing interactive tutorials to reach a wider audience, localization of knowledge from English2Arabic is taking place the way propaganda is also localized from Arabic2English, and there's also an ongoing networking going on between cyber jihadists and Turkish hacktivists converting into such on a religious level. Case in point - MuslimWarriors.Org defacement campaigns with "anti-infidel" related messages.

Cached Malware Embedded Sites

Google, with its almost real-time crawling capabilities, has rarely proved useful while researching malware embedded sites who were cleaned before they could be analyzed, mainly popular sites who get crawled several times daily. However, Yahoo's and MSN's search engines, with MSN providing Archive.org type of historical crawling content, have been an invaluable resource in providing the actionable historical intelligence in the form of what was embedded at the site, where was it pointing, are there many other sites currently embedded by the same campaign etc. This is an interesting opinion stating that cached malware embedded sites are a security problem, well they're, but the bigger problem to me is that it's only Google that's taken efforts to deal with the problem next to the market challengers - Yahoo and MSN - "Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live search engines contain page-caching flaw, says Aladdin" :

"Researchers at Aladdin Knowledge Systems have discovered a “significant” vulnerability in the page-caching technologies of three major search engines, allowing them to deliver malicious pages that have been removed from the web. The researchers discovered the vulnerability when analysing the content of a hacked university website. The site was cleaned, but malicious content was still reachable via search engine caches. The flaw is a "glimpse of the future" of multifaceted web-based attacks, said Ofer Elzam, director of product management at Aladdin."

Let's discuss the current model of dealing with such sites. Whenever Google comes across a site that's potentially malware embedded, they don't just label it "this site may harm you computer" but also remove all the cached copies of the site. By doing so, they protect the "cached surfers crowd", and by doing so, often prompt me to locate the actual cached copies with the embedded malware hopefully still there by using other search engines, ones whose crawling capabilities aren't as fast as Google's.

Therefore, don't put Google in the same row as Yahoo and MSN, since Yahoo and MSN do not provide such in-house built malware embedded sites notification services, and given the slow content crawling, it's among the top reasons why I love using their search engines given I'm aware of a malware embedded site, but couldn't obtain the obfuscated javascript/IFRAME before it got removed.

Here's an example of how useful cached malware sites are for research purposes. Back in September, the U.S Consulate in St.Petersburg was serving malware, and the embedded malware link was removed sooner than I could obtain a copy of the infected page. Best of all - there were still cached copies available serving the malware which lead to the assessment of the campaign. Another great example that the intelligence sharing between the industry, independent reseachers and non-profit organizations, is resulting in far more detailed exposures of various malicious campaigns, compared to a vendor's self-sufficiency mentality.

This is how Google understand the malicious economies of scale, where efficiency gets sacrificed for a short lifecycle of the campaign, a trade-off I've been discussing for a while especially in respect to the Rock Phish Kit :

"Examining our data corpus over time, we discovered that the majority of the exploits were hosted on third-party servers and not on the compromised web sites. The attacker had managed to compromise the web site content to point towards an external URL hosting the exploit either via iframes or external JavaScript. Another, less popular technique, is to completely redirect all requests to the legitimate site to another malicious site. It appears that hosting exploits on dedicated servers offers the attackers ease of management. Having pointers to a single site offers an aggregation point to monitor and generate statistics for all the exploited users. In addition, attackers can update their portfolio of exploits by just changing a single web page without having to replicate these changes to compromised sites. On the other hand, this can be a weakness for the attackers since the aggregating site or domain can become a single point of failure."

Google are clearly aware of what's going on, but are trying to limit the potential for false positives of sites wrongly flagged as ones serving malware, which is where malicious parties will be innovating in the future, while it still remains questionable why they still haven't done so by obvious means - RBN's directory permissions gone wrong for instance.

The bottom line - cached malware embedded sites are a valuable resource in the arsenal of tools for the security researcher/malware analyst to use, and not necessarily a threat if it's Google's approach of removing the cached copies we're talking about, prior to notifying of the infection. Which leads us to more realistic attack tactic than the one discussed in the article, where an attacker will supposedely embedd malware at different sites, let the search engines crawl and cache it, than remove the sites and wait for the visitors to use the cache, thereby infecting themselves. Case in point - the U.S Consulate's site for instance wasn't even flagged by Google as malware embedded one, which is hopefully the result of their fast crawling capabilities, but the ugly attack tactic I have in mind is not just embedding the IFRAME, but embedding an obfuscated IFRAME that leads to the usual obfuscated exploit URL, which is what happend in the Consulate's case, an obfuscated IFRAME by itself.

Have Your Malware In a Timely Fashion

Keep your allies close, the human right violators closer. French officials have been receiving lots of criticism by human rights groups regarding Moammar Gadhafi's visit in France, in fact Human Rights Watch issued a press release entitled Al-Qadhafi in France. Despite the logical response in the form of criticism, it's lacking the long-term strategic vision and the proven approach of dealing with crying kids - pay them attention, give them a candy and therefore try to integrate them don't isolate them.

If it were "embedded malware as usual" the wannabes would have started mass mailing links to malware infected sites spreading rumors regarding the visit, like a previous PSYOPS operation on behalf of an unnamed intelligence agency. However, in this case they embedded malware at a French Government's site related to Libya in order to eventually infect all the visitors looking for more information during the visit. That's a social engineering trick taking advantage of the momentum by proactively anticipating the rush of visitors to the site. Another such recent combination of tactics aimed to increase the lifecycle of the malware embedded attack by embedding it at Chinese Internet Security Response Team's site during the China's "Golden Week" holiday.

According to McAfee "Web Site of the French Embassy in Libya Under Attack" :

"The people behind these attacks love to use highly topical issues in order to attract as many people as possible. This week in my country, the visit by Libyan President Muammar Khadafi is stirring controversy. It has made many headlines in France. No doubt this is why the French Embassy Web Site is now infected by malicious code. Please do not attempt to reach the site, it is still dangerous."

Let's pick up from where McAfee left in the assessment. 4qobj63z.tarog.us/tds/in.cgi?14 (58.65.233.98) loads an IFRAME to fernando123.ws/forum/index.php (88.255.94.114) which is MPack hosting the actual binary at fernando123.ws/forum/load.php or fernando123.ws/forum/load.exe

Detection rate : Result: 9/32 (28.13%)
File size: 43008 bytes
MD5: 8ce2134060b284fa9826d8d7ca119f33
SHA1: 3074f95d6b54fa49079b20876efa0f4722e7fe7d

As for the second campaign at 4583lwi4.tarog.us/in.cgi?19, the malicious parties were quick enough to redirect the IFRAME to Google.com, in exactly the same fashion the RBN did in the Bank of India incident definitely monitoring the exposure activities in real-time. However, accessing through a secondary IP retrieves the real IFRAME, namely winhex.org/tds/in.cgi?19 (85.255.120.194) which loads winhex.org/traff/all.php that on the other hand loads kjlksjwflk.com/check/versionl.php?t=577 which is now down, and 208.72.168.176/e-notfound1212/index.php where an obfuscation that's once deobfuscated attempts to load 208.72.168.176/e-notfound1212/load.php

Detection rate : Result: 14/32 (43.75%)
File size: 116244 bytes
MD5: 42dacb9f7dd4beeb7a1718a8d843e000
SHA1: d595dd0e4dcf37b69b48b8932dcf08e9f73623d0

Deja vu - 208.72.168.176 is the "New Media Malware Gang" in action, whose ecosystem clearly indicated connections with the RBN, Possibility Media's malware attack, Bank of India and the Syrian Embassy malware attacks, and Storm Worm which I assessed in numerous previous posts.

All your malware downloaders are belong to us - again and again.

Combating Unrestricted Warfare

It's February, 1999, and two senior colonels from China's PLA, namely Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui depressed the world's military thinkers by coming up with a study on the future developments and potential of asymmetric warfare in a surprising move next to the overall discussion always orbiting around symmetric warfare. The study itself entitled "Unconventional Warfare" is an ugly combination of Sun Tzu's 3D perspective on warfare in combination with guerilla approaches to achieve one of Sun Tzu's most insightful quotes - "One hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful." Here's a summary of the study :

"Two senior PLA Air Force colonels wrote "Unrestricted Warfare", presented here in summary translation, to explore how technology innovation is setting off a revolution in military tactics, strategy and organization. "Unrestricted Warfare" discusses new types of warfare which may be conducted by civilians as well as by soldiers including computer hacker attacks, trade wars and finance wars."

During the years, and especially since 9/11, the tipping point acting as the wake up call that asymmetric warfare is also getting embraced by the bad guys, many other niche research papers were published in the context of information warfare and cyber warfare such as :

Chinese Information Warfare: A Phantom Menace or Emerging Threat?

Information Warfare: Its Application in Military and Civilian Contexts

The Spectrum of Cyber Conflict From Hacking to Information Warfare

Globalization and Asymmetrical Warfare

Cyber Warfare: An Analysis of the Means and Motivations of Selected Nation States

Each of these is a visionary reading by itself, but perhaps it was the need for setting a new milestone into such warfare thinking that prompted the public release of the Unrestricted Warfare Symposium Proceedings Book in 2006 and in 2007. An excerpt from the introduction of the 2006 edition :

"To compensate for their weaker military forces, these actors will employ a multitude of means, both military and nonmilitary, to strike out during times of conflict. The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules; no measure is forbidden. It involves multidimensional, asymmetric attacks on almost every aspect of the adversary’s social, economic, and political life. Unrestricted warfare employs surprise and deception and uses both civilian technology and military weapons to break the opponent’s will."

Moreover, the 2007 edition is covering in-depth such popular asymmetric threats posed by jihadists (pages 135/143) debunking the use of WMD as a priority, and the cyber dimension (pages 251/297) with some remarkable analogies post Cold-War strategies applied to modern digital threats :

"Technology alone is never going to solve the IA problem. We have no informed national defensive strategy in this area. The situation is starting to change and improve, in large part because visionaries like General Cartwright are in key slots. But we do not have a lot of time. The intelligence community is not sufficiently engaged in conducting, analyzing, and reporting those issues. During the Cold War, we analyzed Soviet capabilities exhaustively. We did everything possible to understand our adversary and manage that gap. We need to do the same thing today. The bottom line is that it is dangerous to underestimate the capabilities of our adversaries. They do whatever it takes to win. Good adversaries know our strengths and weaknesses. They develop surprising partners that sometimes do not even know they are partners—they will give someone an honorarium to talk at a conference and ask that person for information on associates. They play by a different set of rules. They see offense as a systems problem, while our defense is fragmented."

All of these reports and Ebooks are highly recomended bedtime reading, and so is the last but not least one, namely "Victory in Cyberspace" released October, 2007. Besides generalizing cyberspace war activities, it includes a comprehensive summary of the events that took place in Estonia during the DDoS attacks.

Related posts:

People's Information Warfare Concept

China's Cyber Espionage Ambitions

North Korea's Cyber Warfare Unit 121

Chinese Hackers Attacking U.S Department of Defense Networks

Electronic Jihad v3.0 - What Cyber Jihad Isn't

Electronic Jihad's Targets List

Teaching Cyber Jihadists How to Hack

Empowering the Script Kiddies

OSINT Through Botnets

Corporate Espionage Through Botnets

Overperforming Turkish Hacktivists

Hacktivism Tensions - Israel vs Palestine Cyberwars

The Current, Emerging, and Future State of Hacktivism

Internet PSYOPS - Psychological Operations

DDoS on Demand VS DDoS Extortion

The Biggest Military Hacks of All Time

Phishing Metamorphosis in 2007 - Trends and Developments

WindowSecurity.com have just published my second article entitled "Phishing Metamorphosis in 2007 - Trends and Developments" :

"During 2007, phishers demonstrated for yet another consecutive year their persistence and creativity on their way to socially engineer as many people online as possible, into believing they are who they pretend to be. Why did phishers embrace economies of scale during 2007, what factors contributed to the constantly shrinking period of time it takes for the phishers to come up with a fake email, and how come that despite all the public awareness put into the problem, people still fall victim to phishing scams? This article aims to provide an overview of the key factors that contributed to the growth and evolution of phishing during the year."

An article, which you'll definitely find as informative as the first one from last month related to "Popular Spammers Strategies and Tactics".