Most Recent News from the Lab
 

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

 
Online stock trading is risky Posted by Mikko @ 13:50 GMT | Comments

Online stock trading companies

Buying and selling stock online is big business. It also carries it's own risks. And we don't mean the risk of doing bad investments; we mean loosing access to your trading account because your computer got infected by a keylogger.

Take a case of Mr. Valery Maltsev from St. Petersburg.

Maltsev runs an investment company called Broco Investments (available online at www.brocompany.com).

Broco Investments

Unfortunately (to him), Maltsev was yesterday charged by US Securities & Exchange commission.

They claim that Maltsev's extraordinary gains in thinly traded NASDAQ and NYSE stocks were not a co-incidence. Apparently Maltsev used malware with keyloggers to gain access to other people's online trading accounts. With such accounts, he could buy stocks at inflated prices, and use his real account to sell the same stock, for instant gains.

Quoting from the SEC Complaint:

On December 21,2009, at 13:37, BroCo bought shares of Ameriserv Financial, Inc (ASRV) at a price of $1.51 per share. Approximately one minute later, three accounts at Scottrade were illegally accessed and used to purchase shares of ASRV at prices ranging from $1.545 to $1.828 per share. While this was happening, BroCo sold shares of ASRV at prices ranging from $1.70 to $1.80 per share, finishing at 13:52. By trading shares of ASRV within minutes of unauthorized trading through the compromised accounts, Maltsev and BroCo grossed $141,500 in approximately fifteen minutes, realizing a net profit of $17,760.

Here's the stock chart for Ameriserv Financial. You can clearly see the unusually high trading levels on December 21st.

Ameriserv Financial, Inc

SEC claims that overall, Maltsev made more than $250,000. More details in the original SEC Complaint (PDF file)

And this is not the first time we've seen this. There was a very similar case in 2006, where Mr. Jevgeny Gashichev was running a fake Estonian company called Grand Logistics

Grand Logistics

His tactic was almost identical: he used keyloggers and phishing attacks to gain access to stock trading passwords, inflated the price of a penny stocks and cashed in.

Aripaev

SEC claims that Gashichev made more than $350,000. Again, more details in the original SEC Complaint (PDF file)

 
 

 
 
Tuesday, March 16, 2010

 
What do the Targeted Attack emails look like? Posted by Mikko @ 14:56 GMT | Comments

Over the years, we have multiple times posted examples of what kind of booby-trapped document files have been used in targeted (espionage) attacks.

For example:



However, we've rarely shown how these documents were delivered to the targeted, i.e. what the emails looked like.

For that kind of information, we can recommend you to visit a blog called Contagio Malware Dump.

This blog, run by Mila & co analyses targeted attacks in detail, typically showing the original spoofed emails that started the attacks.

Some good examples below — some of them are quite convincing. Would you have opened the PDFs?

contagio malware dump

contagio malware dump

contagio malware dump

More at: contagiodump.blogspot.com
 
 

 
 
Thursday, March 11, 2010

 
Allaple Virus Author Sentenced Posted by Mikko @ 11:20 GMT | Comments

An Estonian virus writer has been sentenced to jail in Harju, Estonia.

The author of the Allaple virus family, 44-year old Mr. Artur Boiko pleaded not guilty.

Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to 2 years and 7 months in prison.

Allaple is a complex worm using polymorphic encryption. It spreads over network shares and by modifying local HTML files. When such HTML files are uploaded to public websites, they spread the infection further.

Apparently Mr. Boiko had been in a car accident and had ended up in dispute over his insurance claim with If Insurance. As a result, his worm launches DDoS attacks against these sites:

    www.if.ee             (website of the insurance company)
    www.online.if.ee    (customer online interface of the insurance company)
    www.starman.ee    (website of a local ISP)

The DDoS attacks were quite serious — see this post from ISC Diary in 2007.

We detected several variants of Allaple during 2006-2007. The problem is that this is not a botnet — these worms have no command and control channel. The infected machines will attack their targets until they are cleaned. There are still thousands of active, infected computers today around the world, and they are still attacking. And the worm is still spreading further.

Snapshot from F-Secure interface showing new samples on 11th of March 2010
Snapshot from F-Secure interface showing new samples on 11th of March 2010

Boiko was sentenced to prison, where he has already been awaiting his trial for 19 months. He was also sentenced to pay the following sums to cover losses:

To If Insurance: 5.1 Million Estonian Kroons (about 330000 Euros or 450000 USD)
To Starman ISP: 1.4 Million Estonian Kroons (about 91000 Euros or 130000 USD)

More info (in Estonian) from ERR Uudised

 
 

 
 
Wednesday, March 10, 2010

 
Be Savvy, Get Six Months of Internet Security Posted by Response @ 17:29 GMT | Comments

F-Secure has an additional blog that launched today. It's called Safe and Savvy.

Safe and Savvy

You'll notice that the name is pink. That's part of our new brand but it also reflects the authorship. Safe and Savvy's contributors are the female employees of F-Secure (mostly).

Hetta, Marja, Annika, Alia, Melody-Jane, (and Jason) have already gotten started.

Read more of Hetta's latest post to learn about six free months of our Internet Security 2010.







 
 

 
 
Select Your Web Browser(s) Posted by Sean @ 17:00 GMT | Comments

I wasn't sure I'd see this Browser Choice update:

KB976002

I set my computer's Regional Options for the United States even though it's physically located in Finland (I'm an American after all).

Regional settings might trump my IP address, I thought… but it seems not. I manually ran Microsoft Update and was provided access to KB976002. Cool.

If you're located outside of Europe and are wondering what's this is all about, read this from the BBC.

Microsoft is offering alternative browser options to European Windows users to settle an anti-trust lawsuit. The update component points users to browserchoice.eu — from where they can select from 12 different web browsers.

On a somewhat not completely unrelated note: Microsoft Security Advisory (981374) was published yesterday.

"Microsoft is investigating new, public reports of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7."

The vulnerability could allow for remote code execution.

Once again, that browser choice link is browserchoice.eu. Share it with your family and friends.

Signing off,
Sean







 
 

 
 
How are ATM skimmers installed? Posted by Mikko @ 12:06 GMT | Comments

ATM skimmers are installed like this:

Skimmer install

Video source: Spiegel.de & German Federal Criminal Office (Bundeskriminalamt)

 
 

 
 
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

 
PDF Based Targeted Attacks are Increasing Posted by Sean @ 15:30 GMT | Comments

Microsoft schedules its security updates on the second Tuesday of the month. Adobe recently began following this schedule as well, and while there are no Adobe updates today, there was an out-of-cycle security update two weeks ago.

That update should now be applied if you haven't already done so.

Why?

Because we're now seeing the vulnerability (CVE-2010-0188) being exploited in targeted attacks (Microsoft also).

Our sample was submitted by a European financial organization and the file name includes a reference to the G20. The exploit drops a downloader and attempts to make a connection to tiantian.ninth.biz. We detect this attack as Exploit:W32/PDFExploit.G.

It doesn't surprise us to see this Adobe Reader vulnerability utilized so quickly.

Looking through our sample management system, we see a growing number of targeted attack files.

There were 1968 files in 2008. The number was 2195 during the year 2009. That isn't a very large increase in the overall total from 2008 to 2009 but we did see a greater percentage targeting Adobe.

And how about the first two months of 2010?

Well, so far the number is 895, which will more than double last year's number if the current pace continues.

The percentage targeting Adobe Reader continues to rise.

Here's a graph with a breakdown of the most common attack vectors used in targeted (espionage) attacks:

Targeted attacks 2008, 2009, 2010 (Jan/Feb)

Updated to add: A couple of readers noticed that our graph's 2009 percentages were slightly off — it's been corrected.

 
 

 
 
Monday, March 8, 2010

 
Darkmarket Avatars Posted by Mikko @ 11:19 GMT | Comments

As "JiLsi" — one of the online criminals from Darkmarket — was sentenced last week to almost five years in prison, we have received some media queries on the case.

In particular, one journalist wanted to know what JiLsi (aka Renu Subramaniam), Matrix001 (aka Markus Kellerer) and Cha0 (aka Çağatay Evyapan) looked like when they were posting to the Darkmarket forum.

So I went back to my notes and dug up example posts from the guys, complete with their avatar icons. Perhaps these are interesting for our blog readers too.

Darkmarket matrix001

Darkmarket JiLsi

Darkmarket cha0

Darkmarket matrix

Cheers,
Mikko

 
 

 
 
Friday, March 5, 2010

 
Desperate Phishing Attempt Posted by Mikko @ 22:26 GMT | Comments

Somebody is trying to pose as us. If you see an email like the one below, please ignore it:

     From: security@f-secure.com
     Reply-To: securitysupport@hotxf.com
     Subject: Security Maintenance.F-Secure HTK4S
     Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 18:11:05 -0000
     To: undisclosed-recipients:;
     
     Dear Email Subscriber,
     
     Your e-mail account needs to be improved with our new
     F-Secure HTK4S anti-virus/anti-spam 2010-version.
     Fill in the columns below or your account will be
     temporarily excluded from our services.
     
     E-mail Address:
     Password:
     Phone Number:
     
     Please note that your password is encrypted
     with 1024-bit RSA keys for increased security.
     
     Management.
     
     Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved.


Before you ask: No, we've never heard of "F-Secure HTK4S anti-virus" either.







 
 

 
 
The Morphing PDF Posted by Response @ 07:00 GMT | Comments

Just when we thought SEO using Flash was as interesting as SEO poisoning can get, it seems it's getting even sneakier…

Imagine a PDF file posted by someone evil online. Of course, Google being Google, the file is recognized as a PDF.

Joe Corvo

And when we open it, it really is a PDF. No evil codes inside, just a good old vanilla PDF file.

Joe Corvo PDF

Three hours later… Google still says the file is a PDF. Brod (one of our geeky guys here) is attributing this to Google's cache.

Joe Corvo, 3hrs later

But is it really a PDF this time around?

Joe Corvo HTML

It morphed! And it even has different topics this time. Topics which, when you follow them, will lead you to another PDF:

Jay Polhill PDF

At least for a few hours before it becomes…

Jay Polhill HTML

It's a vicious cycle, but a pretty neat trick. Who would suspect a non-malicious PDF file right? At least before it becomes an HTML file. And the end result is a rogue antivirus scam.

Response post by — Christine and Mina