“Dhina Thanthi”, “Daily Telegraph” in English, is a popular Tamil newspaper that has its online service on the domain dailythanthi.com. This site has been compromised.

A page hosting model/practice question papers, to aid the students who are to take up their board examinations in the state of Tamil Nadu, has been infected with a JavaScript that in turn loads a BlackHole Exploit. This exploits a cocktail of vulnerabilities across Windows, Java and some Adobe products, etc.

The page contains a JavaScript that in turn contacts the exploit server.

Above are network captures of dailythanthi site connecting to exploit server.

The script was unpacked, thanks to JSUnpack, and we are able to see the iframe that leads to the exploit server.

These servers haven’t been updated as of late, hence there wasn’t any infection to be acquired. But the daily thanthi site still remains compromised.

There are several such domain names hosted on a single IP.

Note the “robots.txt” in the above screenshot of the exploit server’s domain directory. This is to bypass any search bots that might stumble upon this domain from indexing it.

As for K7 users keeping your site blocker up to date would keep you at bay from threats such as this.

When the administrator of the domain from the WhoIs records was contacted we received a mailer-daemon. We then contacted the administrators of the company (interpressindia.com) that maintains the dailythanthi.com site, again it was a mailer-daemon.

As a foot note, if you were wondering what the blog title meant, it is BlackHole written in Morse code.

Kaarthik
K7 TCL

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In tales of yore, circa 2007, DNSChanger malware, which modify certain network settings to point to a rogue server, were as prevalent as the Stegosaurus. Fast forward almost four years, to the present day, their legacy still remains. They say the FBI, having discovered the rogue DNS servers, decided to clean them up and allow them to serve the public good. That is, only until the 8th of March, 2012.

According to much hyped reports in recent weeks, the 8th of March was to be the day the internet died, as the FBI would have been forced to lay to rest those servants of the public weal. If you are still reading this post then your computer didn’t fall victim to the supposed blackout. There are at least two possible reasons for this:

• The FBI has an extension on the deadline. Apparently the dreaded Death Of Internet Day (DOID) has been postponed to the 9th of July, 2012
• Lo and behold, you are not infected with DNSChanger malware and never have been

If you have been a K7 customer for a while, point 2 applies to you. Just to be on the safe side, K7 Security products sniffs for the erstwhile rogue DNS entries and snuffs them out if found, thereby ensuring that our brand new customers too are free from DOID.

Samir Mody/Lokesh Kumar
K7TCL

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For the Latin challenged, the title reads “Cost Accountants of India‘s website is Infected”. Users of a site which belongs to the “Institute of Cost Accountants of India” need to be on the lookout. The site appears to be injected with a malicious script, which may redirect the users to other potentially malicious sites. Here’s a snippet of the malicious source code:

The malware authors have commented their part of the code in Latin. The malicious code uses a twitter API to get the trending topics of the day, and generates malicious domain names on the fly to which users will be finally redirected.

K7 Computing has informed the party in charge about the attack. K7 security products prevent access to this malicious URL.

Lokesh Kumar
K7 TCL

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We recently came across an Indian holiday booking site which appears to be serving up a copy of an old malware. Shown below is the screen shot of the site in discussion:

A quick look at the source code for the page shows an encoded binary file embedded in a VBScript:

Visiting this site with a poorly configured Internet Explorer browser will lead to the above script being rendered. The encoded file in turn is decoded and a malicious file named svchost.exe is dropped onto the user’s computer and is executed.

The malicious executable is an infamous file infector named Win32.Ramnet and detection for this executable has been around for more than a year now. This seems to suggest that the machine hosting the website has either little or no security solution in place.

With the holiday season in full swing, online shoppers are requested not to let their guard down. While you may be on holiday, the miscreants aren’t.

K7 Security products don’t just detect and delete the malicious file, but also prevent access to the hacked site:

Lokesh Kumar
K7 TCL

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It is common knowledge that phishers [Authors of a phish] attempt to steal sensitive information such as passwords, credit card details etc. by masquerading as a trustworthy entity. Some key elements of a phish are:

• A fake website created by simply ripping content off the original site and pasting them on the spurious one

• A bait which engages potentially attractive terms like “Watch nude girls now”, “You’ve won a million dollars”, “Find what your neighbor is up to “, etc. to attract victims

• Scare mongering by using words like “Account has been suspended”, “Computer found to be infected”, “Severe action will taken” etc.

• Create a YouTube video

Yes, you read that right!! Phishers now go to the depths of creating videos explaining to the potential victim how to execute the phish. Call it a “how-to-guide” to give your secrets away, if you’d like.

The site under discussion http://fbshirts.[Blocked], apart from having all the usual elements of a phish also has a video on YouTube instructing users how to give away their Facebook “mobile email address”. This is a personalized email address used to post status updates straight to your profile.

Users who’ve fallen victim to this scam will have a spam message posted on their facebook wall like the one below:

One would like to think that no one would fall victim for such a scam. But the number of hits that this video has received, (80,432 and counting) paints a bleak picture. See image below:

Our usual sentiments about keeping one’s security solutions up-to-date and being vary of giving one’s personal information to unknown sites apply.

Lokesh Kumar
K7 TCL

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We at K7 TCL came across an interesting source for a malware file to be hosted on. The site hosting the malware was the official fan site of the famous Indian playback singer Sonu Nigam.

This file has been up in the server for almost a month now. Users must exercise caution when they happen to download an executable file from a fan site that has remotely no purpose of distributing executable files to its visitors.

The malware file upon execution has capabilities to read saved passwords from a user’s internet browser, Mozilla Firefox, to be specific. It tries to read data from ‘signons[number].txt’ file found in the Firefox directory.

This text file holds the user’s logon information for websites for which the user has set ‘Remember Password’ in Firefox. Now imagine the scale of damage this could cause if the infected machine was a public computer at an internet café.
Following simple practices whenever you use a public computer would save you from such threats:

• Never save your logon information on public computers
• Always clear the history and cache before leaving the computer, or you could use the private browsing session option available in most modern browsers
• If possible use portable applications, these are applications that run out of a pen drive
• Avoid entering any kind of sensitive information on a public computer

For our customers though, it’s just a one step process: keep your antivirus definitions up to date. K7TotalSecurity detects this file, as Trojan ( 001987931 )

The server hosting the fan site has been clearly compromised. The administrators of the compromised domain have been intimated about the impending damage they might be causing to unsuspecting fans.

Kaarthik .R.M
K7 TCL

Fileave.com is a one click hosting site which provides free file hosting for its users. When compared to other similar one click hosts, the 50MB of free disk space provided by fileave.com may sound minuscule, but the fact that there’s no “wait” restrictions or CAPTCHAs to solve before downloading a file seems to make it a favourite among malware authors to host their malicious code.

The graph above displays the number of unique URLs hosting malicious files from fileave.com which were collected by our automated systems.

Closer inspection revealed that the sudden spike from ~100 URLs in the month of July to ~550 in the month of August was due to a mass compromise using the “Black-hole” exploit kit with the final payload hosted on fileave.com. The malware author responsible for this mass compromise had registered a total of ~400 unique URLs in just 1 month in the following format:

• “http://clickme[2 Random characters].fileave.com”

Discounting these URLs, the graph still shows a worrying trend:

The number of malware authors using fileave.com to host their malicious payload is on the rise. Our blog readers might recall that we had recently blogged about how malware authors abuse file hosting services with minimal security checks. The fact that fileave.com has none of these measures in place is bound to be exploited even more by malware authors in the days to come.

Lokesh Kumar
K7 TCL

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Last week at K7TCL we received a malware sample that had an interesting infection mechanism, harking back to the days of DOS companion viruses. Apart from the regular modern behaviour of dropping a self-copy and a registry entry that would initiate it on every reboot, the malware targets every program in the system that was not part of the Windows installation. It creates a copy of the respective program’s main executable and prefixes its filename with a ‘v’. So ‘abc.exe’ would become ‘vabc.exe’. Once this is done the malware then overwrites the original program executable.

The interesting malware functionality here is that it retrieves the icon from the original executable and embeds it within itself so as to masquerade as the original file.

Of course, if the original file has a shortcut and you happen to open the shortcut then this would initiate the malware file instead, since the target filename that has now been replaced by a malware.

Importantly, when the malware gets executed, it in turn initiates the original file in the folder, thereby camouflaging itself on the victim’s computer. It even sets the original program’s attribute as hidden so that the victim would be none the wiser.

In the above screenshot of process explorer it can be seen that malware file gets initiated first and it in turn calls the associated safe file.

The malware’s functionality is merely that of a companion virus, but in a modern context, GUI and all. In the DOS days, companion viruses used to exploit the fact that a file with a COM extension (the virus) always runs before a file with the same stub name but with an EXE extension (the original host). Thus running a filename from the command line without specifying the extension explicitly would result in the virus file running instead of the companion EXE host.

As in the DOS days, the modern companion virus described above can also spread from computer to computer. Consider the scenario where an unsuspecting victim shares his applications with another user. This malware would appear legitimate with its borrowed icon and filename. The sample that arrived at K7TCL had a legitimate program  icon and was not detected by any other AV at the time. Under these circumstances it would be the actual malware file and not the original program being shared, and the virus has the opportunity to do its business on a fresh computer.

K7Total Security detects this malware as Virus ( 002c651a1 )

Disclaimer: No safe files were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Kaarthik R.M
K7TCL

Here at K7TCL, we noticed a spike in the number of samples arriving with the file name “porno-rolik[2 digit number].avi.exe”. Closer inspection of the files revealed that it was yet another variant of a Ransomware. On execution, this ransomware displays a fake error message like the one shown below:

The ransomware then reboots the computer and a sexually explicit image is displayed to the user demanding him/her to dial a premium rate number and enter a code which would then unlock the machine. This particular ransomware even goes to the extent of displaying a countdown message and threatening to delete the files on the computer if the unlock code is not provided within a period of 24 hours.

Given below is a list of the URLs which were found distributing this ransomware last week:

• http://pornovirtualxxx.ru/[Blocked]porno-rolik[Blocked].avi.exe
• http://veryhotxxxporno.ru/[Blocked]porno-rolik[Blocked].avi.exe
• http://bestvideopornoxxx.ru/[Blocked]porno-rolik[Blocked].avi.exe
• http://lolkorussiangirlsporno.ru/[Blocked]porno-rolik[Blocked].avi.exe
• http://megabytespornovideo.ru/[Blocked]porno-rolik[Blocked].avi.exe
• http://pornovirtualxxx.ru/[Blocked]porno-rolik[Blocked].avi.exe
• http://smotripornomnogoxxx.ru/[Blocked]porno-rolik[Blocked].avi.exe

Our blog readers might recall an earlier blog post where we had discussed about how malware authors have gotten better at manipulating peoples behaviour to execute their code & this ransomware campaign is another example of such a scenario. Looking at the file name, the URLs which distribute them and the error message that is displayed on the malware execution suggests that this ransomware arrives as a part of a fake codec scam, possibly when a user attempts to download a video promising to deliver explicit content.

Our usual sentiments about keeping one’s security solution up-to-date & avoiding downloads from unknown sites apply.

Lokesh Kumar
K7TCL

Over the past week we came across several client submissions of ‘Personal Security Pro’, one of those highly ambitious FakeAV families that are currently prevalent.

This FakeAV, upon installation and execution, terminates almost every executable running in your system, which includes even security products. The FakeAV copies itself to a randomly named folder as “%AppData%\<randomnamefolder>\<randomnamefile>.exe” and drops a RunOnce registry trace that has a value that is equally random as the filename and folder name.

This FakeAV has an unusual behavior insofar as it drops a RunOnce entry rather than the standard Run flavour. A registry RunOnce entry is a method provided by Windows to initiate any executable for one time only upon system reboot, the RunOnce entry being deleted thereafter. Hence the life of this registry entry is just one reboot. Thus when you boot back the system and search for any malicious traces in the registry you wouldn’t find any, however the FakeAV would have got initiated. This FakeAV, on getting executed, terminates most processes that are not core system processes. One of the executables it allows us to run is ‘Explorer.exe’. After terminating the processes it drops the RunOnce registry entry again. The cycle is repeated on the next reboot.

The functionality to terminate running processes and prevent new ones from starting up is done in an attempt to circumvent the clutches of security software. In fact, the RunOnce key is added in a strategically temporal manner to avoid it being flagged by HIPS (Host Intrusion Prevention System) rules, ubiquitous in Anti-Virus products these days. HIPS is a method of blocking dynamic malware activity. In the case of the K7 TS11 product, with its robust self-protection, the FakeAV’s attempts at termination are futile, and the malware file gets flagged and quarantined without a problem.

Kaarthik R.M
K7TCL