Underground forums are always full of chatter around various activities related to online crime.
You keep reading about things like dumps (stolen credit card information), carding (using those cards), WU (Western Union), WMZ (Webmoney), CVVs (card verification value) and drops.
So what's a drop?
A drop is a remailing location. Many online shops refuse to send expensive items (think laptops, video cameras and so on) to faraway countries. So criminals use stolen credit cards to purchase items and have them mailed to a local drop, where someone else picks up the gear and forwards it to the final destination. Alternatively the dropkeeper will simply sell the goods in online auctions and then credits the carder with part of the profits.
Here's an example from an underground forum where an individual is advertising his website, providing such services. He offers 25% of the profits of the carder items to the carder — keeping 75% to himself.
For some days we've been spam runs with titles like "CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert" or "CNN Alerts: Breaking news". These are fake news articles that point to a fake news page that will try to download malware to your machine.
Apparently people stopped clicking on fake CNN links as today the attackers switched the mails to look like they are now coming from MSNBC.
Some examples:
Example email:
From: MSNBC Breaking News Subject: msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Elvis Presley daughter gives birth to twins Precedence: list
msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: Elvis Presley daughter gives birth to twins Find out more at http://breakingnews.msnbc.com ====================================================== See the top news of the day at MSNBC.com, and the latest from Today Show and NBC Nightly News. ========================================= This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. You have received this MSNBC Breaking News Newsletter newsletter because you subscribed to it or, someone forwarded it to you. To remove yourself from the list (or to add yourself to the list if this message was forwarded to you) simply go to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11611202, select unsubscribe, enter the email address receiving this message, and click the Go button. Microsoft Corporation - One Microsoft Way - Redmond, WA 98052 MSN PRIVACY STATEMENT http://privacy.msn.com (http://privacy.msn.com/)
And the links point to a web page looking like this (notice the sudden change from MSNBC to CNN):
The site tries to prompt you to download ADOBE_FLASH.EXE, which we detect as Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Exchanger.mn.
There's been some mediacoverage on a recent vulnerability announcment. This is related to Java vulnerabilities affecting at least the Nokia S40 phone platform, and possibly other phone platforms based on a similar Java reference platform.
The vulnerability details have not been released, but if it works as advertised, this vulnerability could affect more than a hundred million mobile phones. This vulnerability is reported to enable attacker to be able to execute arbitrary code on target phones.
The S40 platform has never been targeted by a mobile phone virus or other malware. We're not expecting to see real-world attacks using this vulnerability in the near future either.
With all the attention on China these days, especially in conjunction with the Beijing 2008 Olympics Games, and with ‘China’ being one of the more popular search engine keywords at the moment, it makes sense for malware writers to focus their attention on the Chinese web – and we’ve been seeing some interesting examples of SQL injection attacks specifically targeting website designed for a Chinese audience, whether from the mainland or overseas.
Like most SQL injection attacks, these attacks begin with a compromising script being injected into a legitimate site, compromising it and redirecting its users to a malicious website. This website then takes advantage of the vulnerabilities available on the user’s computer to download and execute malicious programs.
In one of the samples we received, a close look at the obfuscated URL showed that users of the compromised website were being redirected to ‘hxxp://vc??.cn’. Though this malicious website was first reported in April 2008, it is still live and infectious today. Additional mirror sites include pdh0??.cn, iihao??.cn, qqhao??.cn, yyhao??.cn, zzhao??.cn and more, but they all redirect users to two sites hosting the most invasive programs: jzm0??.cn and hby0??.cn.
The ‘vc??.cn’ website basically functions like a transit station, deciding which website the user gets shunted to next, depending on what browser they are using. Whichever route they take, they are finally infected with a password stealer trojan, which we detect as Trojan-GameThief.Win32.OnLineGames.snsq.
The interesting thing about this particular SQL injection attack is that a number of vulnerabilities the malware writers exploit are most likely to be used by Chinese websites, and by extension are targeted specifically towards Chinese (or Chinese-language literate) visitors. For example, the Baidu Soba Remote Code Execute Vulnerability is more or less exclusive to the Chinese web, as is the Sina DLoader Class ActiveX Control 'DonwloadAndInstall' Method Arbitrary File Download Vulnerability.
That's not to say that non-Chinese visitors won't be affected by this attack, as a specially crafted Flash file exploiting Adobe Flash Player Integer overflow (CVE-2007-0071) is also served. When the webpage is loaded, it forcefully floods the user’s computer memory beyond its capacity, then takes advantage of the computer’s attempts to correct the problem to execute its own hidden code. If the user hasn’t updated their Flash Player to newer versions than those targeted, their computer is vulnerable.
For such users then, the best advice would be to run the F-Secure Health Check to determine if your computer has all the latest updates and most importantly, don't click on any suspicious links related to the Olympics!
Greetings from Las Vegas, it's again that time of the year.
Black Hat 2008 is in full swing and DEF CON will start tomorrow.
On the first day of Black Hat the most popular presentation was, as could be expected, Dan Kaminsky's DNS talk. The room was totally packed while Dan went through in detail what exactly was the story behind the biggest vulnerability announcment of the year.
Dan actually spent most of his talk coming up with creative ways on how to exploit this DNS problem and combine it with other vulnerabilities - quite creative. Bottom line; if DNS doesn't work, pretty much nothing will work.
We have a presentation of our own coming on Sunday at noon in DEF CON, when Teo and Hirosh from our labs will talk about how to fight new types of phishing.
Khallenge III was over the weekend, here are the current solution statistics:
Level 1: 393 Level 2: 20 Level 3: 8
During the run of the competition, the final level was solved by 4 people:
1. Igor Skochinsky (iPod Touch 32GB) 2. Kaspars Osis (iPod Touch 16GB) 3. "bbuc" (t-shirt) 4. Ludvig Strigeus (t-shirt)
Igor & Kaspars are returning winners from previous Khallenge competitions (1)(2). Great job guys!
Runners-up: Alexander Polyakov, "Lancert", "push.ret", "Hellspawn", V. Usatyuk, "Piotras", "ASMax"
Level 1 contains a hidden message, here are the winners: 1. Alexandru Maximciuc (t-shirt) 2. Volodymyr Pikhur (t-shirt) 3. Richard Baranyi (t-shirt)
On a personal note, while designing the challenges I've been wondering if level 2 was too difficult. The statistics have proven it was. However, according to your responses, it was great fun! I'm glad to hear that many people enjoyed it. Next year though, we'll aim to get the challenges into a bit better balance. ;-)
There's been some 
