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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Monday, January 16, 2006
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WMFishing Posted by Mikko @ 12:48 GMT

The Microsoft patch for the WMF vulnerability has now been out there for more than 10 days. However, we believe that most of the vulnerable Windows machines worldwide have not installed the patch yet. We also believe this vulnerability will continue to be used by various different attackers for months, possibly years.

Today we saw a phishing scam exploiting this vulnerability. This scam works by sending out emails, urging customers of the global HSBC bank to visit a site called www[dot]jhsbc[dot]com. This domain, naturally, has nothing to with the real bank but it sounds close enough.

The site is running on a owned home computer somewhere in Illinois. This machine, connected to the net via a high-speed cable connection, is hosting or has been hosting several other phishing-related domains, including these gems that administrators might want to filter at their gateways: www[dot]i7tgg4rv[dot]com and www[dot]ll67ffgsp[dot]com, www[dot]mrhpd74e[dot]com and www[dot]pph4e32q[dot]com.

The WMF connection comes from the fact that if you visit this site (and please don't), the front page contains an IFRAME that will try to push an exploit file called tr.wmf to your system. When that is executed, it will download a file called update.exe from the same server. This unexpected gift turns out to be a variant of the Trojan-Spy.Win32.Goldun family, which will start to collect information from the system.

jhsbc

Relevant authorities and the HSBC bank have been informed and work is under progress to get this fraudulent site taken down.