Cyber criminals are drawing advantage from the world's focus on Barack Obama after winning the race for the White House.

Users worldwide were overwhelmed by a flood of spam emails right after results of the presidential race were announced. The spam invites the users to watch Barack Obama's victory speech. Clicking on the link will take the user to a webpage which will require him to install the latest version of Adobe Flash player in order to be able to play the video. Clicking the link to the supposedly update Adobe file, will download a Trojan called 'adobe_flash.exe', which in its turn will install an information stealing Trojan on the user’s system.

This Trojan installs a RootKit, a program that is specifically designed to conceal the Trojan’s presence on the infected system. The Trojan will monitor the victim’s system for passwords of banking websites and will then send gathered information back to server located in the Ukraine.

The following is an example of the spammed email:

eSafe proactively detects and blocks the spammed Trojan as a suspicious file. Only 14 out of the 36 major antivirus products detected the Trojan. The following is a link to the VirusTotal analysis for the Trojan’s file 'adobe_flash9.exe':

http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/58fd7100e69f9c940d6904981834f1fd

AIRC will provide a signature that would name this threat specifically in today’s update.

The Secret Crush invites Facebook users to find out which of their friends is latently in love with them. Users who would click the link would find out that it is actually an adware application that’s targeting them.

This malicious widget made its first appearance early January 2008.  It played on the popularity of Facebook and managed to entice millions of Facebook users to download the infamous Zango adware. Recently, this malicious widget has reappeared and has been infecting users with additional adware such as Zwinky. Facebook users receive an invitation that says: “Someone has a secret crush on you. Find Out Who!” Clicking the “Find Out Who!” link randomly redirects the browser to a number of websites. The target websites may range from hosted ads to adware serving domains.

Here is how the application’s invitation message would look like:

And here are the adware websites that users get redirected to:

 

And the leader according to the highly non-scientific research done using Google for a specific attack vector is: Barack Obama. Obama related sites have managed to get infected in such a way that they attack their visitors in 364 separate instances, while McCain is right behind with 230 instances.

As always, and as we have reported in the past, those behind eCrime are watching the news as diligently as the rest of us and are “affected” by current affairs in terms of the ways they tune their attack vector to achieve maximum exposure to their target market. The financial situation, jobs, housing, and now the US elections are causing a shift in the context of the sites targeted to carry malicious code and perform web attacks in order to gain as many “eyeballs” as possible.

Now, given that this example is just the tip of the iceberg, and only gives a general idea on one specific attack vector, the conclusion is pretty obvious in terms of the global magnitude of having relevant sites infected with Malweb. Do the math, Google’s own tools enable some pretty insightful data into the search trends (and thus the chances that a site that comes up in one of the first 100 results of such search terms) both for sociological and technological studies, as well as for eCrime market reach optimization.

(Image showing Google’s trends search volume for the phrases “john mccain” and “barack obama”)

Now that’s why security research is a little more than just playing cat-and-mouse with a technological attack or a new vulnerability. Security research is also the understanding of how the motive and MO of the attackers work in order to be prepared for the next wave and the next technological advancements.

I’ve been contemplating a title for this post for a long time, eventually I decided to merge two of my favorites (and leave the third alone: looking for the cuckoo’s egg). Basically, after a couple of weeks of almost nonstop work on a major research project (hence the relatively quiet blog), and some major news outbreak following this research (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and more…), it’s time for a quick recap and a preview.

Recap: so, we saw that Neosploit was back, even after the group’s demise in July, we clearly saw that its activity has not subsided and that a build, dated August, is pretty much active and doing its rounds on the net (see older post). We didn’t just sit there trying to watch where the server would go next (which it did in fact – from Argentine to sunny Florida), but also had the chance to do some digging around it, and take a peek into one of the largest cybercrime operations uncovered in the wild, considering the fact that it is being run from a single server.

You are probably familiar with the numbers; over 200,000 credentials to servers around the world (mainly focused on western Europe and the US), tons of back-end applications that the criminals used to manage their operations, and even a brief encounter with a person logged on to the server… (for that, you’ll have to wait for our monthly threat report!).

As part of this activity, CERT has been working days and nights to help us contact all the affected parties. These guys are amazing! They’ve been sorting through the data and figuring out how to communicate securely with the 86 different countries affected is a major operation, (in addition to handling law enforcement communications in the US), so huge kudos to them (you know who I’m referring to NI…).

Nevertheless, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of compromised credentials – we never imagine these could all be contacted by law enforcement or the local CERTs and CSIRTs, so we have set up a page on our site where all you have to do is enter some basic contact info and the domain in your responsibility, and we’ll check to see if they have been compromised or not. Spam free, no commitments – just because we are nice ;-)

The preview, well, the heaps of data that we managed to pull from the criminal server is going to make for quite an interesting read on our next monthly threat report, so stay tuned and watch our brand new AIRC homepage for updates! As I mentioned, backend applications and even a look through the peeping hole to see the attackers on the other side.

That’s it for this time, I'm off to get ready for my talk at BlueHat later this week (more info is also available here).

Despite being reported as “out of business” in late July/August, (see this blog, and this article as well), Neosploit, one of the most widely used tools by cybercriminals, clearly hasn't ceased to exist . In fact, we have recently confirmed a highly enhanced Neosploit 3.1 installation to be out and about, and serving Malweb to hundreds of legitimate Web sites worldwide. We are currently working with law enforcement from around the globe to identify infections and inform organizations.

It’s clear that Neospolit actually planned to create Neosploit 3.1 and has actually made it available for at least the last few weeks on a significant scale.

Another interesting thing to note here is that the recent increase in PDF exploits can hardly be attributed to some new toolkit or older kits attempting to capitalize on the toolkit market, but actually the work of this new 3.1 version. See statistics from an active Neosploit attack server below:

What does all this mean? It’s a truly notable instance where the actual business side of running cybercrime operations pulled a fast one on the thousands of experts tasked with following the latest Web threats. They not only see the profitability of investing in development of newer versions – releasing cybercrime tools much like that of a typical software company. And it’s all proven by their greatly enhanced version of Neosploit 3.1 that was never anticipated by even the largest of security vendors. Instead, security vendors thought newly enhanced PDF exploits (actually a large part of Neosploit’s punch) was actually a new trend within itself – when actually it’s direct from Neosploit.

I would keep an eye on developments in the eCrime business market, for the rock-star of the Malweb toolkits to just disappear one day and declare retirement – does not really fit in to what is really happening in the business. Although the attempt to go under the radar has been greatly aided by reports of security researchers that the group has disbanded, it was hard to believe that they really went under with such a successful brand name and business behind it.

I’ll be covering some of the developments in Neosploit 3.1 at the upcoming BlueHat conference at Redmond next month, so if you are fortunate enough to get there – look for the opening talk.