You’ve probably already heard about the 'Chupa Cabra', literally a "goat sucker". It’s a mythical beast rumored to inhabit parts of the Americas. In recent times it has been allegedly spotted in Puerto Rico (where it was first reported), Mexico and the United States, especially in the latter’s Latin American communities. The name Chupa Cabra has also been adopted by Brazilian carders to name skimmer devices, installed on ATMs. They use this name because the Chupa Cabra will “suck” the information from the victim’s credit card.

The Brazilian media regularly shows videos of bad guys installing their Chupa Cabra onto an ATM. Some of them are unlucky, or incompetent, and get picked up on security cameras and caught by the cops.

That’s what makes installing an ATM skimmer a risky business - and that’s why Brazilian carders have joined forces with local coders to develop an easier, more secure way to steal and clone credit card information. From this unholy alliance, the ‘Chupa Cabra’ malware was born.

A very important “internet trust” discussion is underway that has been hidden behind closed doors for years and in part, still is. While the Comodo , Diginotar, and Verisign Certificate Authority breaches forced discussion and action into the open, this time, this “dissolution of trust” discussion trigger seems to have been volunteered by Trustwave's policy clarification, and followup discussions on Mozilla's bugzilla tracking and mozilla.dev.security.policy .

The issue at hand is the willful issuance of subordinate CAs from trusted roots for 'managing encrypted traffic', used for MitM eavesdropping, or wiretapping, of SSL/TLS encrypted communications. In other words, individuals attempting to communicate over twitter, gmail, facebook, their banking website, and other sensitive sites with their browser may have their secure communications unknowingly sniffed - even their browser or applications are fooled. An active marketplace of hardware devices has been developed and built up around tapping these communications. In certain lawful situations, this may be argued as legitimate, as with certain known DLP solutions within corporations. But even then, there are other ways for corporate organizations to implement DLP. Why even have CA's if their trust is so easily co-opted? And the arbitrary issuance of these certificates without proper oversight or auditing in light of browser (and other software implemented in many servers and on desktops, like NSS ) vendor policies is at the heart of the matter. Should browser, OS and server software vendors continue to extend trust to these Certificate Authorities when the CA’s activities conflict with the software vendors’ CA policies?

Many of the apps we enjoy are free. Well, to call them free is a bit misleading. You pay for the apps by looking at advertisements. This is a platform we should all recognize from the sidebar of Facebook, or Google, or almost any service that doesn’t charge a premium to use it. Advertising has paved the way for many services to gather a huge audience audience and still profit.

On Android and in many cases iOS, the advertisers have gotten very aggressive. They now collect all kinds of data through multiple forms of advertising. I’d like to take a look now at what you can expect.

The Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Incubator program updated their Flash Platform runtime beta program to version 5, delivered as Flash Player version 11.2.300.130. It includes a "sandboxed" version of the 32-bit Flash Player they are calling "Protected Mode for Mozilla Firefox on Windows 7 and Windows Vista systems". It has been over a year since Adobe discussed the Internet Explorer ActiveX Protected Mode version release on their ASSET blog, and the version running on Google Chrome was sandboxed too.

Adobe is building on the successes that they have seen in their Adobe Reader X software. Its sandbox technology has substantially raised the bar for driving up the costs of "offensive research", resulting in a dearth of Itw exploits on Reader X. As in "none" in 2011. This trend reflects 2011 targeted attack activity that we’ve observed. 2011 APT related attacks nailed outdated versions of Adobe Flash software delivered as "authplay.dll" in Adobe Reader v8.x and v9.x and the general Flash component "NPSWF32.dll" used by older versions of Microsoft Office and other applications. Adobe X just wasn't hit. IE Protected Mode wasn't hit. Chrome sandboxed Flash wasn't hit. If there are incident handlers out there that saw a different story, please let me know.

In this webcast, Kaspersky Lab senior security researcher Roel Schouwenberg talks about the Diginotar certificate authority breach and the implications for trust on the Internet. Schouwenberg also provides a key suggestion for all major Web browser vendors.

It has been four months since Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab announced the disruption of Kelihos/Hlux botnet. The sinkholing method that was used has its advantages - it is possible to disable a botnet rather quickly without taking control over the infrastructure.However,as this particular case showed, it is not very effective if the botnet’s masters are still at large.

Not long after we disrupted Kehilos/Hlux, we came across new samples that seemed to be very similar to the initial version. After some investigation, we gathered all the differences between the two versions. This is a summary of our findings:

Let’s start with the lowest layer, the encryption and packing of Kelihos/Hlux messages in the communication protocol. For some reason, in the new version, the order of operations was changed. Here are the steps of processing an encrypted data for retrieving a job message which is organized as a tree structure:

S. Korean handlers are slow to take down the publicly distributed malicious code exploiting CVE-2012-0003, a vulnerability patched in Microsoft's January 2012 patch release MS12-004. We have discussed with reporters that the code has been available since the 21st, and a site appears to have been publicly attacking very low numbers of Korean users over the past day or so. The site remains up at this time.

As some of you may remember, during 2011 we published a malware calendar wallpaper for each month of the year.

We're doing so again this year, with updated information from 2011. However, we've decided to take a slightly different approach this year and publish all 12 wallpapers in one place. You can find them all here.

We hope you like this year's designs and find the data interesting.

Kaspersky Lab malware researcher Tillmann Werner joins Ryan Naraine to talk about the threat from peer-to-peer botnets. The discussions range from botnet-takedown activities and the ongoing cat-and-mouse games to cope with the botnet menace.

Following their major database breach, Zappos leadership is doing the right thing by what seems to be quickly and clearly communicating what data was accessed and what was not - there are no unexplained delays or confusion on their part about the event. It's like another Aurora moment in my book, when Google extraordinarily opened up about their breach while the other 30-odd Aurora-breached major corporations did the opposite, aggressively maintaining NDA's to hide their Aurora incidents and hide their heads in the sand. Zappos reset 24 million customers' passwords and emailed all of them about the problem last night.

Life looks good for Brazilian hackers: the absence of a specific law against cybercrime leaves them feeling so invulnerable that the bad guys are shameless about publicizing their thefts and showing off the profits of a life of crime. We showed some of this in a presentation at the latest Virus Bulletin Conference, and it’s commonplace to find YouTube clips of Brazilian bankers and carders reveling in their ill-gotten gains and rubbing their easy money in the faces of hard-up victims (there’s one example here, and several more out there). It’s also common to find bad guys’ profiles on social networks such as Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Everything is done out in the open, without fear of being caught.

To help new “entrepreneurs” or beginners interested in a life of cybercrime, some Brazilian bad guys started to offer paid courses. Others went even further, creating a Cybercrime school to sell the necessary skills to anyone who fancies a life of computer crime but lacks the technical know-how. On a website dedicated to selling these courses and promoting the “school”, a careful search turns up courses like “How to be a Banker”, “Kit Spammer” or “How to be a Defacer”.

Not so long time ago we found a very interesting piece of malware for Android. Unfortunately, it is not clear how it was spread but in any case it’s worth mentioning. The malicious application displays itself as ‘MADDEN NFL 12’ game after the installation.

The file size is over 5+ MB and actually is a Trojan that drops a set of malware components onto the system: root exploit, SMS Trojan and IRC bot. The .class file "AndroidBotAcitivity" maintains this dropper functionality. It creates a ‘/data/data/com.android.bot/files’ directory and sets ‘777’ permission (read/write/execute for all users). After that it extracts three files - ‘header01.png’ (root exploit), ‘footer01.png’ (IRC bot), ‘border01.png’ (SMS Trojan) - into this directory. Then it sets ‘777’ permission on the root exploit file and executes it. Finally, it displays the text ‘(0x14) Error - Not registred application’ on the screen.

If the exploit is executed successfully and the device is rooted, it launches the IRC bot ‘footer01.png’.

First of all, the IRC bot will try to delete ‘etc/sent’ using the ‘rm’ command:

At the time of writing there is a new Facebook phishing attack going on. It will not just try to steal your Facebook credentials; it will also try to steal credit card information and other important information such as security questions.

This Facebook phishing attack is pretty interesting because it does not just try to trick the victim into visiting a phishing website. It will reuse the stolen information and login to the compromised account and change both profile picture and name. The profile picture will be changed to the Facebook logo and the name will be translated to “Facebook Security” but containing special ascii characters replacing letters such as “a” “k” “S” and “t”.

Once an account is compromised it will also send out a message to all contacts of the compromised account. The message looks like this:

Director of Kaspersky Lab's global research and analysis team Costin Raiu appears on Lab Matters to discuss the security ramifications of the growing dependence on cloud computing. The discussions center on the convenience of using consumer cloud services and some of the risks involved with outsourcing security to third-parties.

Earlier today, I was sitting at home working on a Linux server that was compromised while suddenly, I hear my home phone ringing. Actually, someone has been calling me and just hanging up around the same time everyday for three or four days now. I thought that it was just some telemarketing company profiling me to figure out if I’m home or not, but this time it was different.

When I picked up the phone I heard this guy introducing him as a technician from the Windows Security Support Department. The connection was VERY bad and I could not hear everything he said, I don't know if this was intended or not.

When I started to talk to him he asked me in English with a indian accent if I had a computer at home, and of course I said “yes”. Then he started to explain that my computer had been compromised and that my firewall was just protecting me against external threats and not internal threats. At this time I knew that something strange was going on, and I started to ask more questions about the malware and trying to get more information about them, then at this point he immediately hung up the phone.

Just after he hung up I realized that this was one of those scams where they trick people to install Remote Access software to be able to control the machines. Once they got access to the machines, they install rootkits and obtain full access to your computer.

In the outside world, I this is quite an effective scam because they called me during the day, and I guess the people who are at home by this hour are not your average security researcher from Kaspersky Lab but maybe people who are sick, or the elderly.

I want to warn everyone about these scams, and at this time I can confirm that they are currently attacking Sweden. Previously, such scams appeared to target UK/US users mostly (http://money-watch.co.uk/8183/windows-support-scam-worsens), but it seems their business is expanding.

Please let us know if somebody calls you and claims they are from “Windows Security” (or such) and asks you to install remote access software. Most important of all, do not install the software which they recommend!

When logging into Facebook this morning I saw that many of my friends posted a link to a video on their wall, and also everyone liked the link. The video was of a girl with a nice butt and it had the title "Laura Frisian: the most beautiful ass in the world!", it was pretty obvious that it was a scam because it looked like all the other Facebook scams we have seen, but because soo many of my friends were posting this video I still decided to take a look at it.

I quickly ended up in a JavaScript hell, with obfuscated code and multiple domains. It seems that the server used in this scam is hosting about 300 pages similar to the one im writing about. All of the pages look the same, but have many different videos, a few examples are:

• If you like Nutella, never look this video!!!
• Drill a tooth abscess! Disgusting :s
• Compilation of Embarrassing and Busted! Photos, Awesome :D
• Transgender 10-Year-Old, Boy Happier As A Girl !
• A Really Giant Baby ! Amazing it looks so real :D
• Air Race Plane Crashed in the crowd during a show !
• The worst thing that can happen to a girl!
• A fisherman catches a couple when they make ... :D

It's the end of 2011 as we know it, and Microsoft feels fine finishing out the year with a handful of out-of-band holiday patches. This round is important not because the vulnerabilities directly impact massive numbers of customers and their online behavior on Windows laptops, tablets, and workstations, but because ASP.NET maintains vulnerable code enabling easy DoS of hosting websites, authentication bypass techniques, and stealth redirections to other websites (most dangerously those sites hosting phish and hosting client side exploits and spyware). All of this could curdle your eggnog in the coldest of weather.

There is no secret that cybercriminals try to intimidate users very often in order to infect their machines. We’ve seen a lot of examples of cybercriminals using black SEO for redirecting users to web pages which emulate AV scanning. And there is no surprise that the results of such ‘scanning’ show that the user’s machine is infected with a lot of dangerous malicious apps and it is very essential to download and install a brand new ‘antivirus program’ which is actually fake AV.

But what about smartphones and mobile phones? Cybercriminals have started to use almost the same techniques in order to force users to download and install malware. But in this case we talk about SMS Trojans with fake AV rudiments. Here are some details.

When looking for some popular mobile apps (e.g. Opera Mini) in Google via a smartphone, several search results will redirect users to a web page which may look like this:

Or this:

We have been studying the Duqu Trojan for two months now, exploring how it emerged, where it was distributed and how it operates. Despite the large volume of data obtained (most of which has yet to be published), we still lack the answer to the fundamental question - who is behind Duqu?

In addition, there are other issues, mostly to do with the creation of the Trojan, or rather the platform used to implement Duqu as well as Stuxnet.

In terms of architecture, the platform used to create Duqu and Stuxnet is the same. This is a driver file which loads a main module designed as an encrypted library. At the same time, there is a separate configuration file for the whole malicious complex and an encrypted block in the system registry that defines the location of the module being loaded and name of the process for injection.

This platform can be conventionally named as ‘Tilded’ as its authors are, for some reason, inclined to use file names which start with "~d".

We believe Duqu and Stuxnet were simultaneous projects supported by the same team of developers.

Several other details have been uncovered which suggest there was possibly at least one further spyware module based on the same platform in 2007-2008, and several other programs whose functionality was unclear between 2008 and 2010.

These facts significantly challenge the existing "official" history of Stuxnet. We will try to cover them in this publication, but let us first recap the story so far.

Continue reading

Fabio Assolini talks about the explosion of banker Trojans in Brazil and explains why it is so difficult to fight back against cyber-crime in the Latin American region.

Several Eastern European banks have started notifying their customers in the beginning of last week that their cards have been blocked and will be replaced with new ones. Most of the banks did not give out any more details about what happened, and in many cases even failed to notify their customers prior to actually blocking their cards. Is it just another day in the payment processing business? Based on the rushed response from banks and the lack of information surrounding the case, I would say no.

It all started one week ago after the state-owned Romanian bank CEC Bank blocked ~17,000 cards in response to a security breach at one of VISA’s European payment processor.

The reaction of other banks followed soon. The Romanian branch of ING Bank also confirmed to have blocked compromised cards, but didn’t put out a number. They say they’ve only blocked a few cards, but are closely monitoring the situation.

A few days later, Serbian banks also started blocking thousands of cards for security reasons. Raiffeisen Bank, Komercijalna and Societe Generale confirm they have been informed by VISA about some of their customer’s cards being compromised. Very similar to what happened in Romania.

Rumors indicate the European branch of an electronic payment services provider, Euronet Worlwide, to be the source of this breach. This information has been going around Romanian business media (1, 2) - and though it hasn’t been confirmed officially, it would explain why customers from different banks in different countries were affected.

It’s very hard to assess the severity of this security breach, as the banks’ reaction to these events was very mixed. Some banks proceeded immediately to blocking and replacing all affected cads, while others decided to monitor the situation more closely.

Currently, it’s very hard to get a full picture of what is going on, but as it usually happens, these are unlikely to be isolated incidents. Actually, these stories could be just the tip of the iceberg. If you have recently received such a notification from your bank, we’d like to hear from you, especially if it’s outside Serbia and Romania.

Meanwhile, make sure to follow these 3 basic steps to make sure you don’t become a victim of credit card fraud:

1. Check your statements as often as possible. Make sure all payments showing up are actually made by yourself. In case you suspect a fraudulent transaction, get in touch with your bank as soon as possible.
2. Enable instant SMS notifications if your bank offers it. Some banks offer it for free, others charge for this option. No matter what, it’s worth it. You’ll be able to get instant reports of payments made with your cards.
3. Make sure you keep most of your money in an account that has no card linked to it. Having to move money from an account to another on a weekly or monthly basis might seem annoying, but it can save you a great deal of pain in case your card gets compromised.

Last, but not least, we know it’s the holiday season and shopping is on everyone’s mind. So if you want to keep your money safe when doing online shopping, this insightful article we’ve put together is for you: Online shopping made safe and convenient.

Microsoft finishes out this year of patching with a heavy release that's all over place. While techs were notified of an anticipated 14 bulletins, 13 were released for the month of December. Headline grabbing events and code are addressed in one of them, and while fewer are labelled "Critical", are they any less important?

Many speculative bits have been spilled on the group behind Stuxnet and its precursor Duqu, with our own researchers posting at least a half dozen Securelist writeups on Duqu findings alone. MS11-087 patches up the delivery vector for Duqu itself. This kernel mode vulnerability was publicly identified and confirmed at the beginning of November, but could well have been used quietly in attacks around the world for a year or more.

On 3 December, we noted a rapid growth in the number of detections for exploits targeting the vulnerability CVE-2011-3544 in Java virtual machine. The vulnerability was published on 18 October, but malicious users have only recently begun to make active use of it. It can be used by exploits in drive-by attacks to download and launch malicious programs.

Number of unique detections of Exploit.Java.CVE-2011-3544

According to KSN data, most of the exploits targeting CVE-2011-3544 are used in the BlackHole Exploit Kit, which is currently the most popular exploit pack.

We analyzed the latest BlackHole kits. The sites that carry out drive-by attacks with the help of BlackHole turned up quite an old exploit - a PDF file that targets the vulnerability CVE-2010-0188, and a new Java exploit targeting the vulnerability CVE-2011-3544. The corresponding files are circled in red in the screenshot below.

A screenshot of the list of files intercepted when visiting websites where BlackHole is installed

Brian Krebs reports that the creators of BlackHole have successfully integrated the new exploit into their kit. According to KSN statistics, the new exploits attack users in Russia, the US, the UK and Germany. This appears to be related to the fact that new exploits that are integrated in BlackHole and target the vulnerability CVE-2011-3544, install the Trojan Carberp that steals banking data, as well as SMS blockers. SMS blockers are mostly used in Russia, while Trojan bankers attack users in developed countries.

Once again we see that malware writers are forging ahead and are continually improving their creations. It is, therefore, critical that all users install Java updates from Oracle in a timely manner. The patch for (among other things) the CVE-2011-3544 vulnerability can be downloaded here.