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”.

I was just reviewing the latest FBI report from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) here (PDF), and although I’m sure that a lot of security vendors out there are going to jump on the “33% increase in internet fraud last year” statements, looking into the actual numbers, it’s important to realize how “off” they are. As “Non-delivery” and “Auction fraud” top the charts (with 32.9% and 25.5% respectively), this means that the report only sees the tip of the iceberg. These are just the money mule schemes that are intended for laundering all of the profits actually made by eCrime. And it makes sense – most of the focus for law enforcement is on the lowest hanging fruit, and in the eCrime business model this means money laundering.

Another insight on how eCrime actually works can be learned from the amounts reported (average) per complaint type – the “non-delivery” types (of merchandise or money) ranges around $800 per complaint, while check and confidence fraud are at the $2000-$3000 loss per complaint. This makes sense as when an eCrime “transaction” starts, it is usually based on banking/financial institution account directly, harvesting large sums of money that are later split to smaller amounts (to lower visibility) and laundered through the “field operatives” (i.e. money mules). Bottom line – we still don’t have the full picture and (unfortunately) still cannot amass the true impact of eCrime in economic terms.

The bright side is that there is more awareness in the public (hence the rising numbers – remember that these are based on REPORTED cases…). Although the main focus as I mentioned is still on the perimeter of the business model, hopefully the continued cooperation between law enforcement and the industry (kudos again to the e-Crime congress which I had the pleasure to be part of last month) will get us all to the phase of handling the actual core of the business model and deal with it properly. We’ll keep doing our job in investigating both the technical aspects of the attacks associated with eCrime, as well as the back-office operations, and hope to get everyone lined up to deal with this growing threat. 

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.

eSafe AID – the Attack Intelligence Datacenter has recently discovered a new massive Web attack, operated by RBN, in which an exploit code is being injected on compromised legitimate websites. The injected obfuscated malicious script points to a remote obfuscated hidden IFrame that leads to another obfuscated exploit. The last chain of this multistage Web attack includes Adobe PDF and Windows media encoder exploit variants.

The attack stages:

The first obfuscated exploit code has a low detection rate by Anti-virus vendors. eSafe detects the exploit as JS.Agent.au

The obfuscated exploit code:
 

Virus Total results:
 
 

The attack stages in brief:

1. A user visits a legitimate hacked website where an obfuscated script leads to other hacked websites.
2. The second stage hacked websites, located in Ukraine, contain obfuscated hidden IFrames that lead to the hacker’s server.
3. The obfuscated exploit code on the hacker sever contains Adobe PDF and Windows media encoder exploit variants.
4. Affected systems are automatically joined to a bot controller located in Luxemburg.

Tracking the footprints of these domains leads to the infamous RBN (hosting illegal sites, DDos attacks, Hacking, and pornography).