Archive for March, 2008

What’s in a picture?

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Sometimes, nothing that you can look at.
We are analyzing what appears to be a spike in PornClicker activity. The keenly named updater, up.exe, for this software downloads a jpg from smart-browser.com, a “sex browser” software distributor.
Jpeg files normally are a special format of image files commonly used for displaying pictures on the web. But this updater renames the downloaded jpegs to .dll and .exe extensions. They most likely are using the jpg extension on its downloaded executables to evade the simplest firewall and Url filtering schemes.

The delphi-written executable surprises us with a few camouflaging techniques. We are seeing it use multiple plays on Adobe’s trademarked name. For example, when up.exe is run and deletes itself, it uses the unusual suspended process/setthreadcontext technique mentioned in a previous post to start and inject Internet Explorer with its own code. Then, the code running within the IE process creates an “Adobe” directory within the user’s %Application Data% directory. This zombie Internet Explorer process downloads the udpi2.jpg file served from hxxp://smart- browser.com/ updatex/ udpi2.jpg, and renames the phony image file to rundtl.exe. Their code then creates a run registry key so that the app starts every time the machine is booted:
“HKCU\Software
\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\AdobeManager”
“C:\Documents and Settings\p\Application Data\Adobe\rundtl.exe” -sys
Hmm. Is it a pdf reader or Adobe’s download manager? No.

Instead, once running alongside another downloaded .jpg file renamed to an executable component (mdb.dll), the PornClicker connects to Yahoo!Messenger over http and starts spamming out messages like
“I know it’s been a while but check out my webpage and let me know if you wanna talk more”
hxxp://sexmecrazyy .com
It also begins to click on and pull down garbled urls.

Nothing to look at here:

ThreatFire’s name for it is “PuA.SmartBrowser.PornClicker”.
Note- The ThreatFire name has been updated to “Trojan.Injector”.

I like apple and blueberry

Friday, March 14th, 2008

But happy Pi day — 3.14

Pi. It’s transcendental, irrational, or even savory or sweet.
It’s also the number that you magically arrive at when you divide a circle’s circumference by its diameter.

My favorite piku example so far is by a nice brainiac here.
And cheers to the story of Akira Haraguchi’s 16.5 hour recitation of 100,000 digits of Pi.

How is that today is Einstein’s birthday as well?

Aowch

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

A painfully high number of incidents have been occuring over the past couple of days in India, Thailand and Greece involving a bot/mailer that is installed by a “aow4.tmp”, “aowc.tmp”, “aow28.tmp”…you get the idea. The bot is downloaded from 66. 29 . 53. 125/supply/pack (a server hosted by a provider in New Jersey) and then injected into a suspended svchost.exe process. This process then spews mail containing nasty Russian slang and attempts to phone home. Most of the servers that it tries to connect with do not accept its mailing at this time.

AV detection is surprisingly low — there is some generic detection, but the variants continue to morph.

Rootkit components are not delivered with this one, and the downloader utilizes an unusual thread injection technique while deleting its own presence. The tmp file creates a suspended process with the svchost.exe executable, calls GetThreadContext to get the registers of the suspended process, writes its own code to the memory space of the svchost process, and then calls SetThreadContext and ResumeThread on the suspended process to resume execution on its injected code within the remote process. More details are posted here. ThreatFire will prompt users about this injection.