So-called Koobface case was covered in the IT news quite widely, but security mailing lists received the information on Thursday 7th August.

Kaspersky Lab reported about the existence of the worm on 31th July. Hey, it’s more than a week ago, but it took several days until the anti-virus protection was notable.

Remarkable anti-virus vendors have the following detection now:
(listed in alphabetical order)

McAfee – W32/Koobface.worm
BitDefender – Win32.Worm.KoobFace.A
Kaspersky Lab – Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b
Panda Security – Boface.A [Technical name: W32/Boface.A.worm]
Sunbelt Software – Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b
Sophos – detected proactively as Mal/Heuri-D, Mal/Heuri-E, Mal/Emogen-N and Mal/Packer
Symantec – W32.Koobface.A

There is no write-up available from F-Secure, Norman, TrendMicro etc. yet.

The AV industry knows the alias KoobFace too.

The size of the worm is 16 384-16 652 bytes. It is written in Visual C++ 6.0 and packed with UPX and Upack.
The second malware, attacking Facebok users since 7th Aug, is a Trojan horse (Sophos uses name Troj/Dloadr-BPL), spreading as Google video links posted to Wall and is a separate issue.

It’s time to remember that if you don’t see a detailed write-up from your own AV vendor later today – it’s a DEFCON weekend and Facebook has started blocking these from its side already.

But the protection – that’s we need with a delay less than 4 or 5 days.

It was about three years again – exactly on 25th July 2005 when the First Post entry was posted to this Web site.

Today, the blog statistics show that there are currently 1,037 posts and 3,435 comments written.

Time to say a big Thank You to you, readers and all blogger colleagues!

In many Word 0-day vulnerabilities covered by SecuriTeam Blogs Word Viewer utility is being included to affected products.

This week the situation is different, however.

Related to the most recent MS Word vulnerability Word Viewer 2003 and Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 are not vulnerable (Microsoft’s advisory here). Word Viewer 2003 SP3 KB document here, in turn.
To readers not familiar with these cases: Normally these vulnerabilities are being reported related to targeted attacks via e-mail. References are listed here: CVE-2008-2244. This particular case in known as so-called attachement.doc case. Trojan malware related to this case is from MSWord.Agent.cq series.

There are connections to Beijing Olympics too – in the form of attend_the_opening_ceremony_of_the_29th_olympic_games_in_beijin.doc files too.

A fix for this vulnerability is not expected before August ‘s Black Tuesday. The most important question is: how to implement the use of Word Viewer in your organization.

cisco has released an updated version of its cisco security response: rootkits on cisco ios devices document after the eusecwest presentation of mr. sebastian muniz (core security).

hardening, best practices etc, it appears.

thanks Sunshine. for pointing this on mailing lists.

And it was

…almost 30 years since the first spam message was sent.

We can read more here:

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7322615.stm

SANS ISC has collected a very coverage list of April Fool’s Day stories.

It can be found here:

isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4225

My own favorite is Gmail’s new Custom Time feature

It’s time to look the recent state of targeted attacks. Like we already know the main attack vector in these attacks is Microsoft Office attachment. There are no many organizations that simply can filter .DOC, .XLS and .PPT files.
In mid-January Microsoft confirmed that a new, previously unknown Excel vulnerability was used in targeted attacks. On Monday this week US-CERT issued a warning about the new wave of exploitation. This extremely critical vulnerability, rated ’10.0′ by CVSS meter BTW, was known as header information code execution vulnerability.
The fix is included to today’s Excel Bulletin MS08-014. However, Microsoft says the following now:

What causes the vulnerability?

Microsoft Excel does not properly validate macro information when loading specially crafted Excel files.

In January we had a very small pieces of information related tho this vuln and Trojan exploiting it.

Information about the characteristics of these targeted attack can be read via my FAQ documents.

Bank robbers have found a very interesting technique.

From The Local article Police thwart remote-control bank heist:

Surprised last August to suddenly see his computer cursor moving on its own, the employee at the Knivsta branch of Swedbank, north of Stockholm, “discovered a cable connected to his computer linked to a remote control device fastened under his desk,” local police spokesman Christer Nordström told AFP.

The employee quickly pulled the plug, interrupting a transfer of several hundred million kronor, Nordström said.

And how they managed to install this remote-control device? According to the news sources during a break-in before the incident – no money had been stolen from the bank during a break-in.

A comment posted to Technocrat.net is pointing to another interesting case (from CIO Update article) confirmed as keylogger case:

The story is still developing but this is what we know: Thieves masquerading as cleaning staff with the help of a security guard installed hardware keystroke loggers on computers within the London branch of Sumitomo Mitsui, a huge Japanese bank.

These computers evidently belonged to help desk personnel.

Swedbank is the leading bank in Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with more than 21,700 employees serving 9 million private and 480,000 corporate customers.

Top Ten Web Hacks of 2007 list has been released by Jeremiah Grossman.

Link to Jeremiah’s post: Top Ten Web Hacks of 2007 (Official)

Various XSS issues, possibilities of firefoxurl vulnerabilities, dangers of opening PDF’s, etc. etc.

Happy clicking!

Prevx Blog has a good writeup located at prevx.com/blog/75/Master-Boot-Record-Rootkit…

SANS Internet Storm Center has released an interesting timeline story – link here.

From the post based to Verisign iDefense data:

….

• Oct. 30, 2007 – Original version of MBR rootkit written and tested by attackers
• Dec. 12, 2007 – First known attacks installing MBR code
  about 1,800 users infected in four days.

McAfee detects the Trojan as StealthMBR (DAT 5204 or above) and Symantec as Trojan.Mebroot. Sophos uses name Troj/Mbroot-A, in turn. There are names like Trojan.Win32.Agent.dsj and TROJ_AGENT.APA assigned too.

10th Jan: Trend Micro uses the name TROJ_SINOWAL.AD
12th Jan: Symantec sees the infected MBR as Boot.Mebroot. McAfee uses the name StealthMBR!rootkit too.

My Admirer application (previously known as Secret Crush) has been removed from Facebook now. The installation process was canceled during the weekend, but now it is finally gone.

Fortinet reported about the Zango spyware installation related to this application last week. The issue was described in this SecuriTeam post.

Response from Zango Inc. is interesting to read – link to the Zango blog here.

From the post:

At no point in adding the Secret Crush widget to a Facebook profile does the widget install either spyware or Zango software, or even attempt to do so. Any suggestion that Zango software is being “secretly installed” is simply not true.

It appears that there was no automatic installation of spyware at all.

The first spyware spreading with Facebook application has been discovered. Security company Fortinet reports that application called Secret Crush is installing Zango (aka AdWare.Win32.180Solution) with Iframe, technically from ZangoCash.com.

Shortly, this is the spreading mechanism:

In opening the request, the recipient is informed that one of his/her friends has invited him/her to find out more information by using “Secret Crush” (this happens frequently with Facebook’s Platform Application). [Figure 2] exhibits the social engineering speech employed by the malicious widget to get the user to install it.

The text included to the request entry is “One of Your Friends Might Have a Crush on You!”. Additionally, the buttons are ‘Find Out Who!’ and typical ‘Ignore’.
It appears that Secret Crush is not included to Facebook Application Directory (no log-in needed) any more. Reportedly FortiGuard Team has informed Facebook guys and probably the application has been disabled already.

Update 4th Jan: The application mentioned is located here (renamed to My Admirer), still accessible and has “50,708 daily active users i.e. 4% of total”.

The exact number of affected users is not available.

A frequent source ‘A’ sending updated NSA-Affiliated IP resources to Cryptome’s Web site has reported the following new information:

Certain privacy/full session SSL email hosting services have been purchased/changed operational control by NSA and affiliates within the past few months, through private intermediary entities.

Reportedly the following services are controlled:

Hushmail – based in Canada,
Guardster – based in USA,
and
SAFe-mail.net – based in Israel.

Link here: NSA Controls SSL Email Hosting Services

Update 22nd Dec: Guardster Team has posted its response on 21st Dec to Cryptome:

We can assure you that we do not cooperate with the NSA or any other government agency anywhere in the world. We invite whomever is making this statement to provide proof, rather than making a baseless accusation.
….

Response from Safe-mail.net Team (24th Dec) is the following:

1. We never had any contacts, direct or indirect, with the NSA or any other
government agency anywhere in the world.
2. All software we use is in-house development.
3. We have never shared our technology with any other party.
….

Update 30th Dec: Hushmail Team has posted its response yesterday to Cryptome’s Web site:

Hush Communications Corporation, the company that provides the Hushmail.com email service, is not owned, wholly or in part, by any government agency.

Additionally, ‘More info on industry Windows security software’ has been released:

Zone Alarm, Symantec, MacAfee: All facilitate Microsoft’s NSA-controlled remote admin access via IP/TCP ports 1024 through 1030; ie will allow access without security flag. Unknown whether or not software port forward routing by these same programs will defeat NSA access.

The post released in Cryptome.org on 1st Nov informed about the future updates with details related to this issue and this is the first piece of information.

To the new readers: Cryptome: NSA has access to Windows Mobile smartphones

The number of recent QuickTime PoC’s is remarkable large and the active exploitation has begun as well, as many of the readers know.

However, the QuickTime RTSP vulnerability reported on 23th Nov is not the only one.

It appears that WabiSabiLabi team has reported that there is another (they call it zero-day vuln) flaw in Apple’s QuickTime player too.

This is what their blog post states:

We just want to specify that the vulnerability shown on those POCs IS NOT the one present in our marketplace.

They are pointing to PoCs listed at Milw0rm etc.

And a summary:

The first issue reported by Krystian Kloskowski (aka h07) is CVE-2007-6166 – CVSS score 9.3. For workarounds see US-CERT VU#659761.

The second issue reported by unknown person is CVE-2007-6238 – CVSS score 10.0. Reportedly ‘Affected system: Windows XP’.

I’m sure there are people not aware of the recent state of Apple iPhone IMEI case.
It was reported by UNEASYsilence blog (pointing to the older forum post of Hackint0sh.org) that “Stocks” and “Weather” widgets send the IMEI number to Cupertino.

I.e. like this:

iphone-wu.apple.com/dgw?imei=%@&apptype=finance

The fact is, however, that the string being sent is not the International Mobile Equipment Identity code.

Reference: Docpool.org/iphone/The day after.en.html

What the widget sends is UUID code (Universally Unique Identifier).

Hey, IMEI has 15 characters (and only numbers) and UUID has 32 characters.

It was 11 day ago when JAR: protocol vulnerability in Firefox was reported by pdp.

According to Bugzilla entry #369814 upcoming Firefox 2.0.0.10 (tests done with Gecko/2007111504) are immune to this vulnerability.

A Mozilla Security Blog entry posted by Mozilla security chief Window Snyder has been released too.

However, as a workaround NoScript version 1.1.7.8 and later may prevent this vulnerability from being exploited, as US-CERT VU#715737 states.

The fact is that the Bugzilla report mentioned was filed as security sensitive on 8th Feb already. The disclosure of Petkov made it public.