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).
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.
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
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.
SEC claims that Gashichev made more than $350,000. Again, more details in the original SEC Complaint (PDF file)
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
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)
F-Secure has an additional blog that launched today. It's called 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).
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.
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:
Updated to add: A couple of readers noticed that our graph's 2009 percentages were slightly off — it's been corrected.
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.
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.
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.
And when we open it, it really is a PDF. No evil codes inside, just a good old vanilla PDF file.
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.
But is it really a PDF this time around?
It morphed! And it even has different topics this time. Topics which, when you follow them, will lead you to another PDF:
At least for a few hours before it becomes…
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.
