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Asus.com Compromised With Exploit Code

Posted by kdawson on Sat Apr 07, 2007 06:34 PM
from the be-careful-out-there dept.
Security Bug
Juha-Matti Laurio writes in with news that the Web site of ASUSTeK Computer (asus.com) has been compromised to spread exploit code. The original report from Kaspersky Lab claimed that the compromise lead to code exploiting the recently patched Microsoft Windows Animated Cursor (.ANI) 0-day vulnerability, but sans.org found no evidence of this. Apparently a malicious iframe was added to one of the machines in asus.com's DNS round-robin.
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  • Further evidence that ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Aminion (896851) on Saturday April 07 2007, @06:42PM (#18651123)
    ... you don't have to visit porn, warez or shady sites to get your computer infected with all sorts of nastiness; "trusted" sites will just do.

    • Windows is unfit for business uses. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What this actually shows is that Windows is unfit for business uses. Even when using their top-end Windows Server products, it's obviously a very poor choice. Between the great expense, the low quality and the numerous security problems, there's no good reason to be using it.

      I can think of one reason why a company would go with Windows-based systems: ignorance. This includes ignorance on the part of the network designers and administrators, who do not stand up and demand to use Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, AiX, F

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by toadlife (301863)
        So what exploit in IIS6 do you think let this hack happen?
      • Unfortunately, it becomes a chicken vs. egg problem - critical apps that only run under windows, ergo they need windows. And they need windows because all of their customers are using windows, so.....

        Convincing your CEO or CIO to switch to FOSS (even if they would dearly love to) is like convincing a hard core gamer to drop microsoft. They will do it the day WOW or Everquest or runs flawlessly under Linux.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by PPH (736903)
          What sort of Windows-speific app do you think Asus has to run on their web servers? All they are doing is distributing divers, technical specs and product literature. From the point of view of a Unix/Linux/Solaris system, these are just binaries and the web servers could care less about the contents.


          This is one of the problems I've seen repeatedly with CIOs who have been brought up drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aide. They've never bothered to question the 'one size fits all' sales pitches.

    • ... you don't have to visit porn, warez or shady sites to get your computer infected with all sorts of nastiness; "trusted" sites will just do.

      I suspect the actual plan was to infect all the people mis-typing "anus.com"

      P*S

  • jpeg or png? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MichaelSmith (789609) on Saturday April 07 2007, @06:54PM (#18651195) Homepage Journal

    TFA:

    up to no good pointing to another obfuscated javascript and a executable cloaked as a jpg file

    Then:

    Name: next3.png

    So is next3.png the real exploit and are they using "jpeg" to mean an image file? Or is there a jpeg file involved here?

  • Most of the motherboard oem's use IIS for their web sites. They tend to be incredibly slow, go down all the time, and often render poorly (or not at all) on anything other then IE.

    All signs of poor admins.

    • Re:not the least bit surprised (Score:4, Informative)

      by GeRM_007 (627791) on Saturday April 07 2007, @07:30PM (#18651411)
      I was on their site last weekend, looking for a new BIOS and drivers. Their support web server was completely down. I called up to complain, and their tech support told me that they are aware of it, and have been having problems with it for a couple weeks now as they are changing their infrastructure. A couple weeks!!! Even their tech support couldn't access it, or even tell me what the BIOS version number was. This compromise is probably a result of an incorrectly configured server, which is a result of incompetent admins. All this results in them losing me as a customer. Good riddance Asus.

      • I'm shocked... SHOCKED! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Excelcia (906188) <kfitzner@excelcia.org> on Saturday April 07 2007, @08:36PM (#18651751) Homepage
        How dare their web site go down when I need a driver? How dare anyone ever have a problem they don't know how to solve in sufficient time to deal with my selfish and entitled demands? Their tech support exists (solely, I might add) to tell me the bios version I need. So bye bye Asus, I consign you to the ash heap of history while I move along to a company that forces its developers to blog for me, whose support staff reads my every web site comment (including the ones on third party sites), and that spends every last dollar it has on server infrastucture. Of course, I don't particularly care that this company will be out of business in no time, because there are a constant influx of new companies who are willing to lose money for a year and fold.

        And to top it all off... BAH HUMBUG!
        • To be fair, he shouldn't have to wait three weeks to get a stupid tech support question answered or download a driver. They should have some kind of backup plans in place (or make a new one up, with a three week window, there's even time for that) in the event that the website is going to be down for that long. Especially if they know it's going to be down for that long.

          Three weeks is a long time for a total tech support blackout.
        • Not trying to be an asshole or anything, but DARPA invented the net so that there would be no un-recoverable points of failure.

          Learn how to do stuff without having to rely on computers.
        • For the longest time, I loved my Asus notebook (A7Vc). Heavy fucker, but great. 1.86GHz Pentium M (It's 18 months old), 2GB RAM, 1440x900, ATI Mobility Radeon x700, integrated HDTV. Lots of nice stuff.

          But it hasn't seen a driver update from Asus in coming up on a year. Not a single Vista driver? For a notebook that was one of your top-of-the-line models (yeah, yeah, I know time moves fast)? When there are HUNDREDS of posts on your forums about the integrated webcam breaking EVERY video input software under

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Flendon (857337)
          Asus is known for their site being down for days at a time, having horrendous javascript, and often breaking in firefox. They are also known for having an unresponsive customer service. The most common answer you get is "look at our forums", yet their own forums indicate the problem is known and unresolved. To pick just one issue I've had with them as an example, due to their buggy firmware my DVD+-RW was recognized as a CD-R for over a year before they finally fixed it, with hundreds of people claiming the
      • remember when companies would just have an FTP site (sorted by product model) that you could get in and download the drivers you needed?

        Progress, I tell ya, progress.

    • "and often render poorly (or not at all) on anything other then IE"

      Because that has a whole lot to do with the admins, or the webserver they run...
    • At least it's IIS 6, according to NetCraft.
      • lol. just because windows ships less secure then any of the others OSes doesn't mean that have to stay that way. I have some very secure windows systems that have been running trouble and update free for quite a while now (two years for one).

        Now I'm just as much an open source fan as anyone here. A linux box probably would have been a better system to use the a windows one. But there is no technical reason that windows couldn't be used in this way and be just as secure overall.

  • Asus Site Is Always A Mess Anyway (Score:3, Insightful)

    by chromozone (847904) on Saturday April 07 2007, @07:23PM (#18651383)
    Many people who like Asus products know the Asus website is awful. No problem on that site would come as any surprise to anyone who goes there for updates or information. I'm glad it's no big deal this specific problem but that is still one dodgey site that needs TLC quite desperately.

    • Re:Asus Site Is Always A Mess Anyway (Score:5, Informative)

      by madclicker (827757) on Saturday April 07 2007, @07:48PM (#18651471)
      I second that. They use M$ ftp servers with download speeds of 7MB per second. They have an issue since 2000 and never been able to fix their website. What a shame for a company that deals with technology. The funny thing is on their download site they have four locations like: Global, USA, China, Europe, Japan, but all are coming of the same subnet. Morons.
    • Yeah, their website is atrocious and they don't seem to care. That's unfortunately not uncommon among motherboard manufacturers.

  • Advice (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MindStalker (22827) <(ude.usf) (ta) (nesralj)> on Saturday April 07 2007, @07:26PM (#18651401) Journal
    Ok, friday I reinstalled a Asus laptop. While applying updates I was downloading asus drivers. Should I be concerned that I visited their site without a fully patched system? I hate to do it all over again? Any suggestions in how I can tell if I was infected.
    • Isn't "installing a laptop" just plugging in the power supply / battery?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Plutonite (999141)
      If you visited their website using IE then yes (and insert a lot of jeering here for using IE) be very concerned. Firefox is immune because it's the IE rendering engine that is exploited.

      That said, your file explorer on windows also uses the said engine, so any files you download are a threat as soon as you browse to their location. If you have put these files somewhere you know of, try using the windows shell to move them into a directory you don't like to go to very often. Then wait until spyware/anti-vir

      • Re:Just assume you're infected. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Aladrin (926209) on Saturday April 07 2007, @08:22PM (#18651659)
        As much as I hate to agree with a troll, he's partially right. It's best to assume you have been infected. Even if all the current anti-spyware doesn't find it, that doesn't mean it won't pop up soon. We don't know enough about this malware to identify what it is and if you have been affected, apparently.

        On the other hand, the troll is pretty much wrong about everything else, including "Furthermore, if you use WINE you can run virtually all of your existing Windows applications and games." I have been trying to get windows-based games to run for quite some time, and with the exception of a few favored games (WoW) and some old ones that were really simple, not much works at all, let alone with hours of tweaks. (Actually, I don't even own WoW, so I could be wrong about how well it works as well.)
        • In other words, that AC was not a troll, just an AC preaching to the choir. Your description of your experience with WINE is not the norm these days. But we don't know the extent of your problems because you don't name any apps that don't work. WINE is an appropriate substitute for many people.
        • Yeah, wine cannot even run simple mfc applications correctly. It is good as an ad-hoc substitution, but not a real solution. An example: fixme:richedit:RichEditANSIWndProc WM_STYLECHANGING: stub fixme:richedit:RichEditANSIWndProc WM_STYLECHANGED: stub fixme:richedit:RichEditANSIWndProc WM_STYLECHANGING: stub fixme:richedit:RichEditANSIWndProc WM_STYLECHANGED: stub fixme:richedit:RichEditANSIWndProc ECO_AUTOWORDSELECTION not implemented yet! fixme:richedit:RichEditANSIWndProc ECO_NOHIDESEL not implemented ye
          • I'm running 9.33, and 9.34 does solve one of my major issues. (The cursor for Guild Wars.) I'm running Kubuntu and I'm just waiting for the package to update so I can have that. It still has major sound issues, and locks up, though. (I tested with wine-git.)

            Morrowind runs, but has no music because wine refuses to play the mp3 soundtrack. Playable, though, I admit, once you use a no-cd patch.

            And there's my biggest complaint: You HAVE to use a crack on most games to even get them to start up. There's b

  • It's not a DNS error-- it's a html page error (Score:3, Informative)

    by postbigbang (761081) on Saturday April 07 2007, @07:50PM (#18651483)
    The Kapersky source material is poorly written. Dig was used to compare DNS servers, but the actual problem was a round-robin home page with outreaching code with little presents inside. At first glance, it sounded like a DNS exploit but it's not-- it's a good old fashion page re-write. DNS has nothing to do with it.

  • SANS DID find evidence of an ANI exploit: (Score:4, Informative)

    by I)_MaLaClYpSe_(I (447961) on Saturday April 07 2007, @08:41PM (#18651801)
    From isc.sans.org [sans.org]:

    UPDATE #2: That second javascript referred in the vbscript above didn't decode, it seems it's just not encoded right, but when decoding the string with a plain base64 routine, it does decode to what leads to an ANI exploit. You never know what a buggy script and a buggy browser do together.
  • Have you actually tried to use their servers?

    They are so unbelievably slow and unresponsive you have to use the .tw version.

    I don't remember always having those problems, but in the last few years it seems they have not grown to meet the demand.

    I think this should guarantee safety for more then a few of us who gave up going back there.

    • They run Windows 2003. Just about says it all doesn't it?

      On the other hand, I recently following some live changing events I had to work with three different machines in getting them back up and working. A HP kayak early P3 generation, a self built asus P3 (both dual) and a g3.

      Can you guess from wich site I had the least problem getting info?

      Yeah the apple site was fast, and constantly telling me about OS-X while the actuall bloody machine ran 8.6, HP had retired much of the data leaving only ASUS to sti

  • I'm surprised that whomever managed to crack into ASUS's servers only inserted malevolent HTML. Imagine the utter destruction they could have caused if they had *enhanced* the firmware downloads with some sort of (probably boot-sector) virus, or simply modified them to destroy the motherboard... *Shudder*

    Why wouldn't they? Are the file images stored separately or otherwise better protected?
    • No money in it, for starters.

      The people involved in doing things like this are more than likely part of groups who seek to make money by "selling" comprimised hosts to the various other nefarious computing industries like spammers, etc.

      Not to mention of course that modifying binary code, especially BIOS firmware, etc to do the sort of thing you suggest and still actually function is very difficult indeed. Chances are the people who altered the Asus site could've easily used script-kiddy proof-of-concept ex

    • Re:DNS needs improvment... (Score:5, Informative)

      by The MAZZTer (911996) <megazzt AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday April 07 2007, @06:42PM (#18651125) Homepage

      You DO know that www. is just another subdomain, right? The only reason it's special is because most/all websites mirror <hostname> onto www.<hostname>. But it doesn't HAVE to be like that. Slashdot doesn't do it like that, for instance.

      It doesn't matter if the DNS entry has www. on it or not, the address is still owned by the same person and will get directed to a machine they specified (or nowhere).

      • Err, but this will not work if the web server on that host is using virtual website configuration, that is it has multiple sites tied to one (or group of) IP addresses. In many such cases the virtual sites are associated with the a full URL, such as "www.asus.com". So by going to "asus.com" you are not only not guaranteed to get the same site but even if you do the first link on that site might turn out to be an absolute one. And back you go to the broken "www" subdomain.
        • Look up the Apache ServerAlias directive. You can alias as many alternate names as you want under the virtual host without creating a separate virtual host definition for that hostname. Technically either way would work, but it's just a lot less work.

          • That does not matter in this case.

            The GP is insinuating that one can "always" go to the 2nd level domain instead to its "www" sub-domain and get to the website. I merely pointed out that in many configurations (specially large, multi-lingual sites) that is not true. If you alias the virtual sites you still haven't avoided the problem because only one of those can be aliased to "mydomain.com" (which in case of such large sites usually goes to the "Wold-wide" site which then asks you to select your country a

      • Yeah but quite a few sites dont have a DNS entry for domain.com. They only have one for www.domain.com.
        Pain in the ass.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by nuintari (47926)
          This is a whole lot different than what most sites do. Notice how you type www.slashdot.org in, but end up at slashdot.org? Yeah, the line "HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently" means they redirect you away from the www, probably because a lot of us think the www is stupid.

          Most sites are configured to accept either the www.domain, or just the domain. Slashdot is not one of them.

    •     The one that always annoyed me was Promise. That is, when I was still using their hardware. :)

          http://promise.com/ [promise.com] goes to a blank index page.

          http://www.promise.com/ [promise.com] goes to their real content page.

         

    • Re:I heard rumors (Score:5, Informative)

      by bmo (77928) on Saturday April 07 2007, @06:57PM (#18651213)
      "that Investor Village was spreading some "updater.exe" the other day (via ads), so this might have been a bit larger than just the one site?"

      It's spyware from an ad service. It's like those "Your computer is infected" ads on a Yahoo page.

      The real carrier of the evil is dropspam.com, which pretends to be a spam filtering service. I fired up VMware and installed upgrade.exe out of morbid curiosity. The results are here:

      Msg: 26529 of 26688 4/6/2007 6:57:44 AM Recs: 26 Sentiment: Not Disclosed
      By: Boyle M. Owl Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites
      Posted as a reply to msg 26470 by sco_source_scam

      Re: IV advertising malware? Dropspam.com

      The tiny program is a downloader and installer. I have run it inside of VMware, the only way to run Windows...

      It may be legitimate, but read on, and grok the implications of the license....

      3. Licensee's Covenants
      (a) The Licensee has read all information pertaining to the operation of the Software and expressly agrees that the Licensor shall be permitted to make any modifications, alterations and re-configurations to the Licensee's computer hardware and software including its email inbox and outbox as required for the normal operation of the Software, including but not limited to the re-routing of emails to the Licensor's server for the purposes of screening emails for spam and viruses and attaching a brief message promoting the Software to all out-going emails of the Licensee.

      The licensor can kindly stay the fuck out of my computer, tyvm.

      (b) The Licensee further agrees that the Licensor shall be permitted to send emails (Authentication Emails) on behalf of the Licensee to those email addresses which have been stored in the Licensee's computer or which appear as senders in incoming emails, for the purposes of authenticating these email addresses and providing the recipients with an opportunity to update the Licensor with additional authentic email addresses.

      "We're going to examine your drive for email addresses, and then we're going to spam the shit out of your friends."

      (c) If the Licensee wishes to delete or remove the Software for any reason, such deletion or removal must be carried out using either the program or software removal tool inherent in the Licensee's computer operating system including the Add/Remove tool provided by Microsoft® Windows, or such other similar program or software provided by the Licensor, which will be available to the Licensee through the Licensor's website. The Licensee acknowledges that if the deletion or removal of the Software is carried out by any other manner or by using any program or software other than those described above, the Licensee's email software or system may not be restored fully and/or may fail to start up and function properly, and as a result the Licensee may not be able to receive or send emails.

      "Yeah, ya see, our program so severely fucks your system that if you try to remove us with something that might work, we'll break your smtp and pop3 server pointers."

      As I wrote this, several other popups came up and want me to install shit. Ahahahah, I'm going to install all this and then I'm going to run a friend's malware scanner to see what it really does.

      Ghod...this is what being a windows user is like?! I have forgotten!

      --
      BMO

      Msg: 26531 of 26688 4/6/2007 7:18:35 AM Recs: 25 Sentiment: Not Disclosed
      By: Boyle M. Owl Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites
      Posted as a reply to msg 26529 by Boyle M. Owl
      Re: IV advertising malware? Dropspam.com

      I do this shit so you don't have to...

      Up until I installed upgrade.exe, the system was pristine except for an installation of OpenOffice and Opera....

      BTW, this is just a _part_ of the log that goes on forever...

      Checking system programs...

      Checking Windows directory contents...
      c:\windows\appupdate.exe: Version info not found (Suspicious)
      c:\windows\ewwsetup.exe:

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MichaelSmith (789609)

        Anyway, this has basically made the (virtual) computer useless and annoying.

        You should put the virtual disk under version control.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by bmo (77928)
          "You should put the virtual disk under version control."

          VMware does that. To clean the virtual machine, you can pick any of the older images. I was asked if I tried uninstalling using the spyware company uninstaller and I said no. I picked the April 1 image out of a perverted sense of humor.
          --
          BMO
    • Have you ever used the ASUS website? Any of their websites (the US, the European or the Taiwanese one) is always down, or slowed down to a crawl. It's nigh impossible to get anything (let alone information or drivers) from there. I used to surf around for minutes searching other sites to download their shite and their page was still coming in at 1k/s and they seem to have a 3MB large page.

      So yeah, it's already off-line, slashdotting it is not going to help a lot.

    • You bought a cutrate product and expect firstrate support.

      Mmm, do you have any idea how much tech support costs? Do you have any idea for that matter just how little margin there is on products like this?

      They just don't want to do personal tech support because it eats away their profits like you won't believe.

      Oh, and if you know your device, you can easily find it on their site and then find all the drivers you need.

      It is slow as hell, to be sure but you cannot fault them for you not being able to find

    • Do you also have an Asus keyboard?

      Does it have an Enter key? ;-)

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