Fake Facebook alert leads to Blackhole, malware

Due to the huge popularity of Facebook and its one billion active users, bogus emails impersonating the social network are constantly hitting users' inboxes.

The latest of these is a notification alert about "activity you may have missed on Facebook":



Clicking on any of the offered buttons or the "unsubscribe" link ultimately lands users on a page hosting the Blackhole exploit kit serving an exploit for Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

Victims who use any of the vulnerable versions of these two software and no AV solution are automatically saddled with an information-stealing Trojan.

The Trojan variant in question is now detected by 28 of the 43 AV products used by Virus Total, but at the beginning of the spam campaign even those who had AV software installed were not safe, as the malware was detected by only three of them, Webroot warns.

Users are advised never to follow links offered in unsolicited emails, no matter how legitimate they look. Check your Facebook account for "activity you have missed" if you must, but do it by logging in through the legitimate login page.

Bogus Apple invoice leads to Blackhole, banking malware

If you receive an invoice seemingly coming from Apple that apparently shows that your credit card has been billed for $699,99 (or a similar preposterously huge amount of money) because you bought postcard, don't click on any of the embedded links no matter how curious or alarmed you are.

The bogus invoice looks good enough to fool many (click on the screenshot to enlarge it):



"The link 'View/Download' ends in download.jpg.exe, while the 'Cancel' and 'Not your order' URLs end in check.php," shares Graham Cluley. "The smart social engineering bit is that, whether you are simply curious what this is about or furious about this unauthorized charge, you are still likely to click one of the links."

A click on the former link will automatically download the malware, while a click on the latter ones will take the victims to a bogus IRS page warning them that they are using an unsupported browser.

But this is simply a smokescreen designed to puzzle the user while the Blackhole exploit kit works furiously in the background, trying to exploit a host of Oracle Java, Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Reader vulnerabilities.

If it succeeds, the victims' computer is infected with a variant of the Zeus / Zbot banking Trojan. If not, they are offered a download of the latest version of their browser. The offered file is named update.exe and is also a Zeus Trojan variant.

Digitally signed ransomware lurking in the wild

Trend Micro researchers have spotted two ransomware variants bearing the same (probably stolen) digital signature in order to fool users into running the files.

Other than that, the malware acts like any other ransomware: it blocks the victims' computer and shows messages that seem to come either from the FBI or the UK’s Police Central e-crime Unit:



"Users may encounter these files by visiting malicious sites or sites exploiting a Java vulnerability," say the researchers.

And if the bogus law enforcement messages are anything to go by, it seems that those same malware peddlers have managed to hack the DNS records of Go Daddy hosted websites so that they can redirect victims to malicious sites hosting the Cool exploit kit.

Sophos' researchers speculate that the DNS records hijacking was due to stolen or weak passwords.

"Go Daddy customers who wish to check they have not been affected by these attacks should check their DNS configuration according to the Go Daddy support page," they advise.

Facebook Black Is Scamming You

As more and more people join social networks like Facebook and Twitter, it only gets easier for scam artists to pick off a few non-discerning users. The latest scam that's making its way across Facebook offers to change your user interface to a cool, new color if you're sick of the boring old Facebook blue.

Users are now seeing images advertising the new "Facebook Black" in their news feeds. The image asks users to click a link shared above, which will then lead them to an official-looking app permissions screen. Of course, there's no such thing as "Facebook Black" and clicking on the link will only open you up to a possible security breach.

Sophos' Naked Security blog reports that the ruse is the work of survey scammers, who prey on unsuspecting users who will complete surveys in order to receive the promised product. These surveys earn affiliate cash for the scammers.



"Are you sick fo that boring old blue theme? Well now you have the power to change your facebook color to anything your heart desires," reads the page. Sophos claims that some versions of the dubious link attempt to fool users by displaying a limited time offer and prompting them to generate a code to access the new feature.

Although they may look legit to the untrained eye, some of the scam landing pages can be easily identified because they have failed to wipe the text from previous clickjacking scams, such as the Remove Facebook Timeline scams popular earlier this year.



As always, the advice here is to investigate any "new feature" or "offer" that seems too good to be true or out of the ordinary. And if you happen to get caught up in a scam, make sure you remove any corresponding likes and app permissions from your Facebook account.

Malware targeting Skype missed a trick

Last week reports came out stating that the Dorkbot worm is now targeting Skype users. The worm fools users into downloading the malware, whose payload locks down machines. Once infected, users' contact lists are pinged with the message "LOL is this your new profile pic?" and a .zip file.

When the .zip file is clicked it opens a backdoor and installs the worm. The machine is then enlisted into a botnet and users are asked to make a $200 payment within 24 to 48 hours in order to receive their files back.

This ransomware aspect of the worm is a new element compared to the previous strains that affected Facebook and Twitter.

Dominique Karg, Chief Hacking officer from AlienVault, comments on why he thinks the Dorkbot will not be as effective as it could have been:

“There are three things about this worm that surprises me:

Firstly, the phrase "LOL is this your new profile pic?" makes it look like this is targeted at a younger segment of the population. Therefore really narrowing down on the victims.

If the target is the younger generation then $200 seems like a lot of money for that "target" audience. Why not make it $50? I think a lot more people who have contacts who would send them a .zip file with a "LOL is this your new profile pic?" message would pay $50 or $100 rather than $200. And I'm thinking about the US here. $200 in some other countries is a small fortune...

Why the 24/48 hour timeframe? Are the authors trying to urge people into paying before the malware gets deleted? The harm is done anyway at this point, deleting the malware won't get the files back, as far as I know, so why the urge?

This malware doesn't exploit any system vulnerability; it exploits trust so with the right message they could have got a lot more people to be fooled into executing the program (worm). We always warn people to disregard attachments from unknown people. However, in this case this file is being sent from your trusted ‘buddies’.

It surprises me that the people who have written this malware have not made the message change depending on the target. If the target's name is 2 words, then they could have put something more serious, like "please don't share this but I wanted you to have it", while to a 1 word destination (much more likely to be a nickname or a "buddy") they could have sent the above message.

Finally, in Skype you can also see the local time for your contacts, which should give you a rough idea of where they are located at "wealth" wise, therefore enabling them to adjust the ransom accordingly. The writers of this malware are definitely missing a trick."

New TDL4 rootkit successfully hiding from AV

A new variant of TDL4 has been identified, and it is now ranked as the second most prevalent malware strains within two months since detection.



The characteristics are similar to the iteration of the TDL4 rootkit, detected by Damballa a month ago. Damballa picked it up through its network behavioural analysis software, which detected the generated domain names that this new TDL4 variant apparently uses for command-and-control communication.

Since Damballa could only determine the existence of the new malware by looking for domain fluxing, it was concluded that no binary samples of the new malware had been identified and categorised by commercial antivirus products operating at the host or network levels.

HitmanPro, however, has detected Sst.c – also known as Maxss, a modification of the TDL4 strain and it is spreading fast.

This new variant is capable of infecting the Volume Boot Record (VBR) (also known as Partition Table), and commercial antivirus products are unable to detect it, let alone remove the malware.

Joseph Souren, Vice President and GM Wave Systems EMEA, has provided the following commentary:

“Following the success of TDL4, hackers have been able to use the rootkit to develop new variants that continue to go undetected by antivirus. The latest iteration, dubbed Sst.c, infects the Volume Boot Record.

Without embedded hardware security to detect anomalies of behaviour in the boot process, it starts to cause havoc damaging the network. It also reduces the window of detection for the enterprise to contain the threat.

The best defence is based on the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. The TPM stores the signatures of critical start-up components of the machine, and the ones that are most important are used early in the boot process before the antivirus initiates.

By utilising TPMs, the enterprise can collect data from the computers and correlate computer information that is not visible for traditional malware scanning software. The IT manager is alerted when unwanted changes are detected.

It’s undoubtedly not the last we will hear of these types of Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) and activating and managing embedded hardware security is the only way to detect these attacks early enough to prevent damage to the network.