Archive for the ‘Spam’ Category

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FBI IC3 2009 Report

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

The Fbi released its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2009 report. The organization maintains that cyberfraud losses reported to them doubled year over year.

The report contains what appears to be significant changes. The report includes mention of the FakeAv scams that have plaqued users over the past couple of years. Another friend just brought in a laptop screaming “Your system is infected!” yesterday, most likely due to a banner ad drive-by. At this point, it’s hard to believe that the fraud is not occuring on a large enough scale to quantify the criminal activity.

The report provides list of the most common complaints that the IC3 received in 2009, including spam, identity theft, credit card fraud, and computer damage, all things that an additional layer of protection like ThreatFire effectively helps protect your system against.

Complaints of internet crime, including spam and fraud, should be filed here, in addition to making other appropriate contacts. They can’t report on what is not filed.

Posted in Click Fraud, Crimeware, Fbi, Government and Cybersecurity, Incident, Rogueware, Scams and Monetization, Spam, Uncategorized, cybercrime | No Comments »

Waledac Ate Curb?

Friday, February 26th, 2010

A recently reworded post on Microsoft’s attempt to pursue malware distribution in the courts makes it appear that something permanent and substantial has happened in anti-malware efforts (demonstrated by a legal and collaborative effort called “Operation b49″ to takedown Waledac C&C domains). Because of the complications (legal and otherwise) delaying server and domain takedowns, it’s great to see this botnet’s well-known command and control server domains pursued by the powerful legal team. On the other hand, in the meantime, users’ systems continue to be infected with Waledac. And much like the FakeAv organizations and the “John Doe” defendants that Microsoft has filed against in the courts in the past, cybercriminals herding Waledac most likely will pick up and continue to operate in the shadows beyond the reach of law enforcement — the domains and malware most likely will change to evade the takedowns pushed by their court approach. It’s a situation that has been described as “wrestling with a pig”.

In the meantime, the best way to protect yourself is with the latest install of ThreatFire. From our statistics in the ThreatFire community, we see that Waledac binaries continue to attack systems on a daily basis as a bump on the “threat landscape”. The ISC’s post title mistakenly implies that Waledac is not infecting system’s on a daily basis because the group’s “Storm-like” spam campaigns of 2009 have discontinued and because a specific list of domains have been removed, but in fact, Waledac binaries like these are attacking systems on a daily basis. For instance, over the past few days, workstations in the ThreatFire community were attacked by and protected from Waledac in the US and parts of Europe.

Anyways, the ISC handler’s post was an interesting writeup and description of past problems in takedowns (current collateral damage described here), and “Operation b49” adds another strong effort and collaboration to clean up the wild wild web. Cheers to that. Let’s hope that the Waledac bot distributors and botnet operators are worn down with the new strategy while watching their C&C servers becoming unreachable. We’ll monitor the bot’s distribution over the next few weeks and post results. Hopefully, the group is worn down for good.

Posted in Bot, Crimeware, Spam, Waledac | No Comments »

Cutwail Spamming for Russian Spammers

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Spam continues to clog the internet with providers reporting spam stuffing 80% – 95% of all email content en route. It’s an ongoing problem into 2010, so last week we examined the active spambot Tedroo, some of its suspicious behaviors, one of its anti-debug/antiRE techniques, and its spam delivery. This week we’ll take a look at Cutwail, a long standing and very active downloader/spambot that suggests regardless of various ISP takedowns, the underground market continues to thrive.

In what seems to be fairly unique to Cutwail (also described as Pandex and Pushdo), the initial Cutwail component delivered to a victim’s system is a downloader/dropper, and the spambot code itself doesn’t touch the disk. This scheme is by design. The spambot code appears to exist relatively unchanged over time, while that initial delivery component is re-developed, re-packed and re-distributed in a myriad of ways along with a set of other components. The end goal is to execute the spambot on the system without it touching disk and without maintaining its code in the downloader.

This particular Cutwail downloader connects to these hosts to download the spambot payload and data (domains modified for readability)…

75.126.159 .19:443
89.149.254 .213
89.149.244 .141
94.75.233 .173:443
94.75.233 .171
94.75.233 .172
89.149.244 .23
aaa.oduvanchic .com
aaa.news2days .ru
fireas*eye .com
f*ckbriankrebs .com
antisgetout .cn

It will attempt to connect to one of the above web severs every 20 seconds until a payload is available and downloaded. The sites are actively brought up and down and often do not respond to an infected host, stymieing research progress on the bot. The bot and data payload itself is served up from these hosts as one encrypted stream of data. Once the downloader completes retrieval, the downloader will deobfuscate/decrypt the payload and launch svchost.exe in suspended mode, injecting the payload into that newly spawned process’s memory. After modifying some the loader data structures inside the process via the GetThreadContext/SetThreadContext APIs, the injector redirects execution to the injected code causing the payload to be run instead of the svchost code.

Due to the complicated packing schemes and highly variable injector code, these initial injectors seem more difficult to detect than the relatively consistent spam payload.  Since the payload is injected directly into a real windows process and does not get written to disk, it proves to be quite elusive.

Once injected and run, the spambot code waits a prolonged period of time to begin its spam run. From our lab, after an eye-rollingly long wait, we collected image-based spam sent out to market prices to Russian readers for spam services:

cutwail_spam_snip2

The image advertises a Moscow based phone line for the “Email distributions. Affordable prices – high quality” touted across the top and the left panel. Price ranges are provided for both Moscow and Russia blasts below (we added the price conversions to USD):

Our price list:
——————————————————
Whole Moscow  =  5000 rubles  ($166 USD)
4 distributions in Whole Moscow  =  10000 rubles  ($333 USD)
——————————————————
Whole Russia = 10000 rubles  ($333 USD)
4 distributions in Whole Russia = 20000 rubles  ($666 USD)
——————————————————
Russia+CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States, the territory of the former USSR)  = 15000 rubles  ($500 USD)
4 distributions in Russia+CIS = 30000 rubles  ($1000 USD)
——————————————————
We have:
——————————————————
-The lowest prices on a market.
-The most present day software.
-Regularly updated databases.
-High response from distribution.

Posted in Downloader, Dropper, Evasion technique, Obfuscation, Spam, Trojan, Undetected malware | 1 Comment »

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