Online Virus / Malware News

Zozzlein a sentence Zozzle is a static web-page analyzer for detecting ‘Heap-Spray Exploits’ [ literal meaning ] ‘a righteous observance of the law’ [ 3-Things It Is ] + a product of Microsoft Researchers hardwork (by Benjamin Livshits and Benjamin Zorn of Microsoft Research, Christian Seifert of Microsoft and Charles Curtsinger of the University of [...]

 
In the wake of the highly publicised “highly sophisticated and targeted” attacks on Google, at least three major governments have issued advisories urging their citizens to switch browsers away from Microsoft Internet Explorer. A well-known security company has redesigned their web sites to include a large ominous “Operation Aurora” graphic (that links to trial downloads of pre-existing software). The attacks have been described as “changing the world” by the CTO of that same security company and as “something quite different” by Google.
 
How much of this is real, justified and proportionate?
 
So what do we know so far? Well according to Google “In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google“. They go on to say “As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies“.
 
Subsequent external conjecture, comment and analysis has blamed unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and also in Acrobat Reader, the malware involved has been identified both as variants of the Hydraq Trojan and also as new malware, dubbed by McAfee as Roarur.dr and as TROJ_PIDIEF.SHK. The attack vectors have been identified as mail with malicious PDF attachments and drive-by downloads.
 
Google, who were hit by the zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, state that at least 20 other companies were victimised, and iDefense who have customers who were hit by the zero-day vulnerability in Acrobat Reader state that 33 companies were affected.
 
The motivation for the attack has been described both as an attempt to steal intellectual property and also as an attempt to breach the security of email accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists. The attacks “appear to have been launched from at least six Internet addresses located in Taiwan” according to James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc
 
“Changing the world”? I say not.
 
The attacks are not the first to use zero-day vulnerabilities, in fact we have most often seen zero-day exploits being first used in targeted attacks before becoming more widely spread and widely abused.
 
The attacks are not the first to use drive-by download or malicious PDF attachments to achieve their goal.
 
The attacks are not the most complex multi-component system yet seen, you want complex, look at Koobface!
 
This is not the first time that warnings have been given to use alternative browsers until a patch becomes available.
 
This is not the first time that the finger has been pointed at China for a widespread globally distributed espionage attack.
 
There is no doubt that this attack, or these attacks are methodologically sophisticated. The bad guys were visibly successful at delivering their malicious payloads to the right people in the right companies to get access to things like source code and email accounts, but I don’t see anything here that changes the world.
 
Social engineering, lack of awareness of the threat landscape, a willingness to share too much information, the highly developed underground economy will all have contributed to the possibility and the success of these attacks.
 
What can companies and individuals do to try to avoid falling victim to these kinds of attack?

• Educate yourselves and your users, clicking a link is enough, opening a PDF is enough to infect you, even on a fully patched system.

 

• That being said make sure all applications and systems are fully patched, if that is not possible, use host-based intrusion prevention to “virtually patch” systems and to secure against zero-day exploits.

 

• When an unpatched vulnerability is identified be sure to follow vendor advice to minimise the risk as soon as possible.

 

• Encrypt valuable personal and intellectual property at file level, that way, even if it is stolen it is of limited value or use.

 

• Consider the deployment of data leakage prevention technologies that will recognise and stop sensitive content from leaving your network.

 

• Rethink your security model from an outside in approach, to an inside out one. Secure data, secure access rights, secure applications. Your perimeter only exists on a network diagram.

 

• At the risk of repeating myself, educate your users not to share too much personal information regarding employers, job roles, contact details. Currently far too many targets are far too visible.

 

• Don’t let Chicken Little run your security.

As reported by Reuters and the BBC, the official website set up by the Spanish government to mark it’s six-month presidency of the EU was briefly compromised yesterday afternoon.

 

Mischievous hackers reportedly took advantage of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on www.eu2010.es and replaced an image of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero with the smiling face of Rowan Atkinson in his Mr. Bean guise, complete with friendly greeting “Hi there!” Perhaps the hackers were hoping the attack would go unnoticed, as apparently there is a physical resemblance between Mr. Zapatero and Mr. Bean (of course I couldn’t possibly comment). The compromise only lasted a few hours until the original content was restored, by 4pm GMT yesterday afternoon, the site administrators were reportedly working on a fix.

In this instance there does not appear to have been any malicious intent, but the dangers of XSS vulnerabilities should not be underestimated. Cross Site Scripting vulnerabilities allow attackers to inject code into innocent web pages in which it would not otherwise appear. This can be used to steal information such as logins or banking credentials, redirect users to malicious web sites or even to directly infect visitors to the site. The real problem is that many web site admins are unaware of the dangers, and even some security companies continue to underestimate and downplay the importance of XSS vulnerabilities and attacks.

On an interesting side note, El Mundo also reported recently that more then 12 million Euros had been spent on “technical assistance and security for the website of the Spanish Presidency [of the EU]“. Again, I couldn’t possibly comment, but SecureSite and Web Application Security are both an awful lot cheaper than that…