Malware Pulls an "Italian Job"

A number of readers sent us word about a malware attack that has been underway since Saturday that began with the compromise of more than 1,100 mostly Italian Web sites. Websense claims that more than 10,000 sites have been infected by now, 80% of them in Italy. There are indications that most of the Italian sites are resident at the same large Italian hosting provider. Trend Micro reports on the attack, which is launched from a malicious Iframe tag inserted into pages on compromised sites. For visitors to these sites, this begins a cascade of "drive-by" malware downloads if one of several targeted vulnerabilities is available and unpatched. The first page to which visitors are redirected by the Iframe hosts a recent version of Mpack attack software. Panda has a month-old report on Mpack (PDF) that provides copious detail about its nefarious ways.

I wish they'd count "servers" and not "sites"

This malware probably just affected a single DreamHost shared server, thus bringing down 10,000+ sites at once.

But this method of artificial number inflating is to be expected from an industry trying to promote their anti-malware, anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-trojan, anti-anti-virus, anti-rootkit products. Anyone actually requiring these craplets to be installed on their dedicated servers have a much larger problem between the keyboard and the monitor to worry about.

Re:I wish they'd count "servers" and not "sites"

and, incidentally, imho software companies should be liable for trouble created by their software as the hosting companies are.

There are many web hosting companies and some of them negate their responsibility to Internet users at large.

The web hosting industry does not get much attention from free software developers. This is broadly because they want to insist that anything they spend money on develping not be usable by their competition. As such, no company (under the terms of the GPL) may make any developer sign any kind of non disclosure agreement for the purposes of receiving GPL code.

The web hosting industry is stuck in a rut of its own design. It uses software that it can't modify to meet its real security needs because nothing exists free that has all of the working features that their customers demand.

This is the problem, this will continue to be the problem for quite some time. Even if a free control panel and billing system were realsed that they find suitable it would only be after perhaps a couple years of development and testing.

Sad, but true. The industry is making us all a victim of its success. It sells the use of GNU/Linux computers pocketing all profits and only giving back to companies that produce software that is not free.. totally against the tit-for-tat that made it such a lucrative market to begin with.

You're right, but you left out some stuff. :) I'm part of that industry, but only one of very few people who speak out against the practice and remain able to eat and pay bills.

Re:I wish they'd count "servers" and not "sites"

A big, usually decent hosting company in the US that I use was getting done over by this - I had 10-20 sites infiltrated over a period of a few weeks, in 2-3 waves using two slightly different techniques. The host denied any responsibility or knowledge, saying that poor FTP passwords were the entry point. My computer was not the issue as those sites hacked were all on this host - no sites on any of the other 5 or more hosts I use were impacted, regardless of the strength of their passwords.

Trivial passwords (single English word of five characters) were guessed as well as slightly more complicated ones (non-English words, eight characters, random numbers inserted).

It appeared to me that were the host NOT the problem, that bots might have been guessing the passwords through brute force? I searched the net seeing if I could find more information about these attacks, but there wasn't much out there, especially given that there wasn't much to search on besides the fact that they used an IFRAME or JavaScript DeCode function, and a probably random set of IP addresses.

Anyone know more about it all?

Queso scan

A queso scan identified the machines used to compromise the servers as Mac Minis...

Mafia spam?

As a sign of this, I just got a spam that insisted I purchase a lower mortgage, along with a photo of a horse head.
     

This is the...

Self Preservation Society...

"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"

It's all Microsoft vulnerabiltiies

Note that Trend Micro never uses the word "Microsoft". That's deceptive. How does Microsoft manage that? This attack depends entirely on vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Media Player. It does try to attack Firefox and Opera browsers by sending them Windows Media files, but doesn't have a direct attack on either browser.

So:

1. Use Firefox.
2. Go to Tools->Options->Content->Manage File Types. Go down the list, and remove or change all entries that automatically invoke Microsoft applications. (Use OpenOffice for .doc, .xls, and .ppt, maybe QuickTime for video files.)

Re:It's all Microsoft vulnerabiltiies

Even simplier:

1. Run Windows Update

What web servers are vulnerable?

What web servers are vulnerable? Been looking around but can't see anywhere anything about the type of web server being infected.

Tiscali?

From the article:
"Apparently, most of these sites are hosted on one of the largest Web hoster/provider in Italy."

Why would I not be surprised if Tiscali's webservers were somehow to blame?...

Is this the...

...mojo-rific Italian Job with Quincy Jones producing it, or the lame up-to-date any-excuse-to-sell-a-video-game version?

After the title...

...I was hoping for a story about a malware attack that involved the use of Michael Caine and numerous Minis.

A malware question to the comunity

Not completely on-topic but hey, it does not warrant a full "ask slashdot" and I've been struggling with this for a couple of days now ...

I've been hit with win32.Perlovga.A on a secondary computer through an infected USB key. That machine had no anti-virus and autorun was at that time enabled (stupid). This particular crapware saves two EXE files (copy.exe and host.exe) and an autorun.inf that executes copy.exe to the root of each volume. When the infected USB key was plugged-in, it loaded the mallware.

I removed all instances of the mallware itself, all is clean and nice, except for:

There seems to be some rootkit left behind because if I extract those two EXE files from where I saved them, they don't show-up in the filesystem unless I boot in safe mode, although nothing gets loaded in memory at this point.

Rootkit Revealer does not show anything suspicious, and AutoRuns shows way too much information and nothing that strikes me as odd.

Anyone has more experience with this one? I will really like to understand what it had done ...

Cheers!
k

Italian Job? I'm confused

OK, I don't get it. So how exactly did this virus mess up the traffic lights in Rome?

Re:Why do they never come right out and say...

Speaking of looking like a douche, it's "viruses". I'll say it again, "viruses". Not virii.

Re: Viruses/Viri/Virii

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virii [wikipedia.org]:

In the English language, the standard plural of virus is viruses. This is the most frequently occurring form of the plural, and refers to both a biological virus and a computer virus.

The less frequent variations viri and virii are virtually unknown in edited prose, and no major dictionary recognizes them as alternative forms. Their occurrence can be variously attributed to hypercorrection formed by analogy to Latin plurals such as alumni or false analogy to Latin plurals such as radii; idiosyncratic use as jargon among a group, such as computer hackers; and deliberate word play, such as on BBSs (see, e.g.: leet).

Yes, viri/virii is incorrect (for now), but when the vast majority of us don't RTFA (or can't, due to the /. effect), you can hardly expect people to figure it out all on their own ;)

Re: Viruses/Viri/Virii

Vir means man. Its plural is viri. Virus is a different word, a rare 2nd declension neuter, meaning (among other nasty things) 'poison'. It has no plural.

But I agree with you, virii is both bad English and bad Latin.

Re:Super Mario Malware!

In a now apparent unfortunate turn of events for me, yes it is. It comes, however, from having that nickname in school due to my buck teeth.

Re:Because it's all...

STFU MSn00b

Re:Why do they never come right out and say...

Insightful my ass...

The day your favorite OS dominates the market, it'll be pwned, don't you worry. And I say this as 1) a Firefox fan, hoping that it never gets to be the majority browser for precisely that reason, and 2) a fan of all the OS's. I use Windows for my desktops, Linux for my servers, and Mac sometimes to play. They all have fans, and I don't feel the need to belittle any of them to make one of the others look better. It doesn't work that way.

Hope I don't get modded down - I'm not so much flaming as ANTI-trolling if you catch what I"m trying to say. heh. :P

Re:Why do they never come right out and say...

"The day your favorite OS dominates the market, it'll be pwned, don't you worry."

If market share is any indication to being pwned; then why isn't Apache attacked more that IIS? According to Netcraft Apache has 53.76% of the market compared to MS: 31.83%

And I say this as 1) a Firefox fan, hoping that it never gets to be the majority browser for precisely that reason, and

I personally only want FF have enough of the market; just enough to make companies follow the web standards: IE not catering to only one browser. Actually, the same applies to ODF; just enough to make companies not require a specific Office Suite.

"2) a fan of all the OS's. I use Windows for my desktops, Linux for my servers, and Mac sometimes to play."
Use what ever works for you.

Defacements....

Look into any defacement reporting site (such as zone-h.org) and look at the numbers. They vary every day, but ion average about 60% of the defacements are for linux boxes. So there you have.

What the parent poster talked about was the very low amount of Apache-targeting viruses and exploits compared to those targeting IIS. Apache is the most widespread server software, but IIS is the one that gets most viruses.

And most of the time this kind of vector is used as described in current article : as a way to get control on machine to distribute malware and/or be used in a botnet.

Whereas, what you speak about - defacement - is done in most of the case, by stupid script kiddies who just use some random tool to exploits bugs (either remote execution or SQL injections) found in common PHP script (forum engines, etc.), it is mostly server independent. Apache or IIS doesn't matter as long as poor script code is present with known vulnerability. Therefore, you're very likely to find that the defacement frequence follows closely the market share of the servers.

Most of the time, the script kiddie just put "I am teh 1337 r0xx0rs !" in the front page. You can't do much with a compromised script (you can't start a IRC server, put a zombie bot, a full mail server for spitting spam or use it as a starting point to infect other servers in the vicinity).

Re:Why do they never come right out and say...

Regardless of scoring points in the OS/browser pissing competitions, I'd just like to know what OS and browser are vulnerable, so I know whether I personally have to worry about this.

The summary and linked articles don't even say that. Only Panda's MPack report, a dozen pages in, starts to list the actual vulnerabilities targetted. Which are IE, WMP and one Opera bug. However, the malware is actually modular in which new vulnerabilities can be plugged in, so this isn't static, and they say new versions come out about once a month.

Nevertheless, unless the WMP vulnerability works on multiple browsers, it's just Windows IE (duh) and Opera. No mention of Linux, Mac or Firefox I saw.

Re:Why do they never come right out and say...

Looks like Windows*. No really. Yes again.

" 1) A Trojanised WMF File (Downloader)
    2) ActiveX/OCX File (dropper)
    The downloaded malware, when executed, installs
    1) A rootkit "

Most of the world is in denial about the whole security issue surrounding
Windows. Even some of the postage on /. is quite alarming. People don't
*want* to know, that's why they don't post it.

[*] - http://blog.trendmicro.com/italian-job-vs-italian- bizness/ [trendmicro.com]

Re:Why do they never come right out and say...

Disclaimer: I am neither a Windows fan nor an Mac hater. I use Windows *nix almost equally.

Everytime some vulnerability is found, someone shouts about not using Windows, especially these Apple lovers. Come on guys, can we stop this? These so called malwares target novice users, not Slashdot users. Tell me a single alternative your mom can use and I will take it. The so called alternatives are either too_expensive (suggest your mom to shell out 2K on Mac just_to_get_on_internet) or too_not_userfriendly. Why not stop beating the drum on Windows?

Re:Why do they never come right out and say...

How does using a different brand of computer make you a "douche"? I think it's the average mac user themselves who think that because they own a Mac they're superior. Actually, I think they thought that before they even got the Mac. I'm a recent switcher, 6 months now, and I don't think I'm any more of a douche than I was before. I'm not a hippy and I'm not artistic, I just like it because it's something I've never used before and it does just about everything I need to do and it's more stable/easier to use than Windows.

And if nobody gave a shit about Macs, why does Apple have a bigger market share than Toshiba and currently has the same size market share as Gateway? Oh, and Apple's market share is growing every day much faster than either of those two companies.


But maybe you're just a troll.

Re:Why do they never come right out and say...

It ain't the platform - it's the application: if you want to use an app that "lifts its skirts" for every intrusion probe that comes along then that's YOUR business.

Can we help it if our apps are just better written than the ones you choose to use? :)

You misspelled truth

It is not spelled troll it's truth.

YES

Any more scans?

Re:Because it's all...

Yeah, They say that Mac users are arrogant fanboys. Please! Compared to the Smelly Linux Hippies, Mac fanatics are nowhere near as bad.

For an OS supposedly open and free and for "The People", the aforementioned "STFU n00b" is endemic.