MoMusings

IMPORTANT - UPDATED

Please note that this blog has now moved to my own hosted domain here: http://momusings.com/momusings/. A full RSS/ATOM feed can be found there.

All the data up to the end of December 2006 will be left here, however all postings from the 1st of January 2007 onwards will only be available at this blogs new home. ALL future postings will only be available at the new site.

Apologies if this causes you any problems.

As I didn’t get chance to post this last week, I decided to do it now, even though I’m on holiday…

November has come and gone and yet again it has been another very busy month for me, winter still hasn’t really arrived in the UK yet. Some farmers are still picking soft fruit as at the start or December, which is normally all over by the end of October at the very latest. On the malware and related security threats front it has been an interesting month with lots of phishing going on.

Like previous months, I will cover some statistics from my own sensors and compare those against those from a couple of major anti-virus companies, and finally I will cover new and interesting things that occurred during the month.

I have created some graphs and performed some trend analysis from the raw data from my WormCharmer and Bayesian filter.

I have included four sources of information for the graphs and pie-charts, these are:

• Kaspersky
• SOPHOS
• WormCharmer
• Malware Bayesian Filter

The last two are my own projects and all data is from the Internet, these systems are running on an aDSL link and are personal research projects that have been running for some time; WormCharmer 4 years, Malware Bayesian Filter 3 years.

In total I captured 1280 samples during November, which have been catalogued as 51 distinct families and variants. In comparison during October I captured 886 samples which were catalogued as 53 distinct families/variants. As you can see the captures in November are up, on both October and even September.

During November I captured and submitted just 1 brand new malware strain/variant [unknown to all or most AV companies at the time of submission].

Although November was significantly up on October, the general trend is still downwards. The main reason for this general downward trend is that the malware authors are using other methods to initially seed their offspring, such as Instant Messaging and e-mail using links instead of attachments, and where attachments are used these tend to be droppers or downloaders which are crafted to evade anti-virus tools. This trend which started as a trickle at the start of the year is now a torrent. This means that real e-mail worms which use attachments are fast becoming an endangered species of malware.

During November I reported over 3,300 new Phishing sites which are now included in the Netcraft phishing site database used by the Netcraft anti-phishing toolbar which I blogged about some time ago.

The first pie chart below shows the Top 10 distinct malware by percentage. Let us look at this in more detail:

W32/Tenga.3666 [Frisk] yet again retained the pole position during November. Unlike October, where it lost ground, its percentage has increased from 40.5 percent in October to over 75 percent in November. Yet again, Tenga.3666 seems very intent in keeping pole position for itself.

The Mytobs have once more completely dropped out of the chart, after making a short lived re-appearance in October.

This disappearance of Mytob from Octobers chart has allowed Netsky.P [aka Netsky.q] to regain the second place spot it gained in August. Another member of the Netsky family [Netsky.d] came into Novembers chart in seventh place.

The share-crawling worms which suffered a decrease in their numbers from seven of the ten slots in August to just four in September have managed to halt this decline. They still account for four of the ten places in November. The four are: Tenga.3666 in pole, Opaserv.worm.ae in eighth, Opaserv.worm.ai in ninth and Opaserv.worm.ac in tenth.
Like the Mytobs, the Mydoom variants have completely dropped out of the top ten during November.

We have four new entries in Novembers chart, these being three variants of the Warezov family [fb, fh and ev], in third, fourth and fifth spots respectively, and Mechbot.d in to the top ten, at six.

If you compare the above to the data from Kaspersky and also the data from SOPHOS you may see some marked differences. Why? Well, simply my sample capture systems collect data from multiple ‘vectors’ and combine the data, so I tend to get a more rounded picture of what is really running round the Internet in the way of net nasties.

As you can see the top 10 from Kaspersky [below] November has seen the Mytob family make a modest comeback in November, they completely disappeared from the top ten in October. The variants that managed to claw their way back into the top ten are: Mytob.c and Mytob.t, in sixth and tenth respectively.

Octobers pole position holder, Netsky.q, has slipped down to seventh and is joined by two other family members, these being: Netsky.t, in fourth and Netsky.aa in ninth place.

Pole position in November has been stormed by Warezov.gj, which is a new entry and this is joined by Warezov.ev in the runner-up spot [second], up from the fifth place it acquired in October when it entered the chart.

Nyxem.E is a re-entry in third place, back in after dropping out of the top ten in October.

Scano.gen, drops from fourth, to fifth and the final member of the top ten, is Zafi.b back in in eighth place.

There are no Bagles or Mydoom family members in November’s chart.

In the SOPHOS chart we see a different pattern; Netksy.p has slipped from pole in October to second spot in November. Its pole position has been stolen by W32/Stratio-Zip [aka Warezov] which was anew entry in October’s chart.

Zafi.b has made a significant climb up the chart in November from eighth up to fourth place and is joined by another member of the family, Zafi.D, in tenth. Nyxem.D [aka MyWife] has also climbed back up the chart from ninth to sixth place.

Only one member of the Mytob family has managed to stay in the top ten in November, this being Mytob.C dropping from sixth to eighth place. Netsky [D] has further consolidated its hold on fifth place.

Mydoom has made a re-entry, in this case it is Mydoom.O back in at seven.

There is only one new entry in November’s chart, this being W32/Sality.AA.

To complete this month’s top ten we have W32.Bagle-Zip which was a new entry in June’s chart, climbing back up the chart to third place which it originally grabbed in July.

The final pie chart below shows the Top 10 malware families trapped by percentage. As you can see this includes not only mass-mailers but also share-crawling worms and bots. This month the table is headed up once more by the September 2005 leader Tenga, which has bounced back from its fall to just 40.5 percent in October, back up to account for over 75 percent of the November pie. Mytob has once more dropped out of the chart after making a brief appearance in Octobers chart. Operserv has regained the second place which it lost in October where it was in third spot. Netsky has further consolidated its hold on fourth. Mydoom also makes it back into November’s chart, in eighth place, after dropping out of the top ten in October. Dupator is up one space from seventh to sixth place.

Warezov jumps from fifth place up to third in November’s chart and is making its presence felt as part of the reason for the massive increase in spam we are all seeing.

Bagle slips down the chart from sixth to seventh and Downloader slips from eighth to tenth place.

New entries include Mechbot and Small, in at fifth and ninth places respectively.

If you wish to see the current top 10, then see my external website at http://arachnid.homeip.net. The data which feeds the WormCharmer stats is updated every 3 minutes 24 hours a day [barring power-cuts, internet connectivity issues or hardware faults].

Please feel free to ask questions if you need any clarification on the data, the setup or whatever.

Now, let’s switch to a different method: The following graph shows the percentage of malware that I received and my Bayesian Filtering tool classified correctly. You can see the data for the whole of 2004, 2005 and 2006 [up to the end of November] here. This clearly shows that November was significantly down from September’s relative high. The overall trend is still downwards.

The raw statistics (both CSV and Graphed) can be found in the usual place on my site. If you feel you need access then please contact me to discuss.

If we look at the overall growth of malware so far this year, it grew from 168,807 [as at the end of December 2005] to 220,091 [as at the end of November 2006]. That’s a growth of 51,284 new malware strains and/or variants so far this year. We could see over 55,000 by the end of the year.

What’s New?
Instead of including commentary here about things I have already written about, I will offer links to other blog entries that may be of interest, topical, or cover some of the interesting occurrences in October 2006.

• Barclays Phish Just Keep Coming
• Massive Jump in Spam
• PayPal Phish With a Sting in the Tail…

Conclusions:
Spam appeared to drop during November, with both 419s and Phishing scams recovering slightly from their fall in October. Malware [via e-mail] also continued to drop during November. However, the amount of ‘personal’ mail to my ‘personal’ mail server rose by over 10,000 during the same period. Could this rise be skewing the figures?

Spammers are still increasing their use of graphical based spam, which is harder for anti-spam tools to identify without the use of OCR or other technologies; not only are they moving to graphical spam but to stop simple filtering based on hashing or check-summing of images, they are producing graphics that contain random micro-dots, colour maps and other graphical artefacts, such as geometric shapes and random borders.

Links:

• Virus Top Twenty for November 2006 [Kaspersky]
• Top ten viruses and hoaxes for November 2006 [Sophos]

Scammed, Spammed, or Both at the same time.

As it is the season for giving gifts and thinking of others less fortunate than ourselves, I was somewhat surprised when I received the following email:

However, I was even more surprised, when I looked at the e-mail in more depth, and the resulting website being linked to in the e-mail.

First off, the e-mail body was a graphic, not ASCII text. This immediately set off alarm bells in my mind, as this is the most widespread trick being used by spammers, especially those that send out spam using botnets.

Secondly, I was receiving dozens of copies of the e-mail, but they all had different forged from addresses and subject lines, another sure sign that it is either the work of a spammer, scammer or malware.

If you went to the site [which is now down], this is what you would have seen:

Very slick, very professional…Of course what they have done is merge the content of two other ‘real’ sites to make this ‘fake’ one.

Even the donation button goes to a ‘real’ payments handling service, who I’m sure had no idea that this was to be used to con people; getting them to part with their money by using a despicable social engineering trick; that of sick children who need help.

Talking of spam, I seem to remember that at the start of 2004, Bill Gates said that the spam problem would be solved within two years…Guess again Bill!

Jan. 24, 2004, Gates told a group at the World Economic Forum that “two years from now, spam will be solved.”

The spam problem will only be solved when two things happen:

1. People stop buying products being offered via spam.
2. The companies that use spammers to hawk their wares are prosecuted, fined or taken to court. Or are made to pay in some other way.

Anyone got any other suggestions what we should do to the spammers; I was thinking along the lines of cruel and unusual punishments, such as getting them to read every spam e-mail sent out by them over a year out loud, whilst being physically spammed, with real ‘SPAM‘

Don’t even ask what I’d like to happen to the scammers…

To all of you out there that are not spammers, scammers, malware authors, cyber-criminals [or normal criminals too] I would like to wish you a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous new year. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, then happy holidays.

Here’s an article of a differnt nature, no malware, no spam, no scams or any of the other usual stuff I write about, this ones about us all making a difference…

Now, don’t get me wrong I’m not a tree hugger, an environmentalist or at the other end of the scale, an anarchist, I’m just an average ‘geek’ that uses too many computers for too many hours of the day. And to help with the guilt of my using all this power and the resulting impact on the environment, I did a little digging and found a little tool yesterday which could well make a massive difference to the amount of carbon and CO2 emissions that I am responsible for; no it doesn’t mean I have to stop being full of hot air, or even stop breathing….Although that probably might help

All of us that use computers, either for work or at home are guilty of leaving them running when we are not always actually using them; this generates significant waste and emissions. To help reduce this you can tweak the power settings on your computer to turn off the display after so many minutes and power down the hard disks when they are not in use. But, how many of us actually do that?

To help make this easier, a useful tool has been released which can help you to save energy and therefore reduce emissions such as CO2 and if enough of us do this we can make a significant impact. So, instead of being part of the problem, we can be come part of the solution.

So, what is it?

It is simply a software tool that you install, and it looks a bit like one of those grid computing type of applications, such as Seti@home, BOINC, World Community Grid, etc. Here’s a picture of what it looks like when it is running:

So, instead of looking for alien signals you can actual do something that will help all of mankind, right here and right now.

I already have it installed on all my computers at home, and have already saved some energy, and I only installed it earlier today.

It is fully customisable, as you can see from these screenshots:

Imagine the impact if all large companies installed this on all their computersll as all home computer users! Not only would they save money [which the bean-counters/bill-payers would approve of], but they could also help to minimise the impact on the environment that their business and/or gaming, chatting, e-mailing or blogging makes too!

Go on you know it makes sense…

It is FREE and doesn’t contain any spyware or other malicious code. You can download it via this banner.

as we

Is this the first case of an honest spammer, or is it just a case of incredible cosmic irony? You decide…

Here is a screenshot of a typical ‘pump-and-dump-scam‘ spam e-mail spotted by my colleague Darren, today:

A larger version can be found here.

As you can see it is a typical spam e-mail offering stocks that the spammers/scammers have bought and are trying to inflate before they dump them and make a profit, leaving all the other new investors out of pocket as a result of their actions.

However, that is not what is important in this case.

Did you notice the chunk of text below the ‘—’?

This is taken from news sites, so should be topical news at the time the spam e-mail is being created. This type of text is added to try and get the spam past anti-spam filters, but in most cases it doesn’t work. But, in this case the final news piece added is just so ironic, that you almost think it had to be added on purpose, just to raise a smile, if nothing else.

I have highlighted the pertinent section of the e-mail to make it clear which news item I’m on about.

So, what do you think, is it a case of cosmic irony, karma, fate, etc. Or, is it a case of a spammer honestly trying to warn the recipient? Nah, scratch that, there are no spammers with that level of concern for their victims, they are only interested in how much money they can make for themselves; worrying about swamping the internet and users mailboxes with the ‘crud‘ they are peddling just doesn’t come into the equation.

Over the last month the amount of phishing scams I see has risen. In fact, since the beginning of November I have reported over 3,000 new phishing URLs. This is a significant increase for me, as I usually only report around 100 to 150.

Each phishing e-mail is checked, all links are tested against the Netcraft toolbar, and any new ones, that the Netcraft toolbar doesn’t yet know about are submitted for inclusion in their database. Nothing too unusual there. However, once in a while I spot something that makes a new phish stand out from the crowd. One of these events happened last week, and this post will explain why I considered it not one of the run-of-the-mill phishing scams.

For starters here’s a screenshot of the e-mail I received:

A larger version can be found here.

Nothing too unusual here, this looks like a typical PayPal phishing e-mail, complete with the fake URL. The one you go to, is not the one shown in the e-mail!

For starters here’s a screenshot of the phishing website you saw [yes, past tense as it has now been closed down] when the link in the e-mail was clicked on:

A larger version can be found here.

You can also clearly see at the time I took this screenshot that it was not detected by the Netcraft toolbar, or even the Firefox anti-phishing functions which are now built into the browser.

As with the original phishing e-mail, nothing too surprising here, a typical PayPal phishing site.

So, I logged in [using false credentials, of course] and filled out the required forms with my name, address, social security number, date of birth, credit card details [including CVV and PIN]. Everything was just like most other PayPal phishing sites, that is until the confirmation page…

This is what I saw:

A larger version can be found here.

Oh goody, I thought, they are offering me a free download of an ‘eBay Toolbar‘ called VGuard, and it is at version 10, yippee! Of course, I immediately downloaded it and installed it, as most users do, don’t they? [Don’t panic, I did download it, but I didn’t install it].

What I did do, once I had downloaded it was to analyse it, here’s the file information:

FileName: Guardv10.exe.1
FileDateTime: 16/11/2006 17:44:35
Filesize: 149254
MD5: 2fadb5a4f3c80e78197d733255136ba7
CRC32: 7B3A6C60
File Type: PE Executable
Packer: Standard PE File

Interesting is wasn’t even packed using the usual malware authors tools, such as UPX, ACE, and so on.

I had a quick peek at the internals of the file and saw it would create some files and execute them, not just any files, a DOS batch [.BAT] file, very suspicious! So I sent it of to be run in a sandbox, and here are the results:

Guardv10.exe : Not detected by Sandbox (Signature: NO_VIRUS)

[ General information ]
* File length: 149254 bytes.
* MD5 hash: 2fadb5a4f3c80e78197d733255136ba7.

[ Changes to filesystem ]
* Creates file C:\TEMP\bt8323.bat.
* Deletes file C:\TEMP\bt8323.bat.

[ Process/window information ]
* Creates an event called .

The results from the sandbox did indeed show that it created a batch file. So, what anti-malware tools detect it. To find out I scanned it using over 30 ‘up-to-the-minute‘ updated anti-malware tools, here are the results:

============================================================

Scan report of: Guardv10.exe

@Proventia-VPS Malicious (Cancelled)
AntiVir -
Avast! -
AVG -
BitDefender -
ClamAV -
Command -
Dr Web -
eSafe -
eTrust-INO -
eTrust-INO (BETA) -
eTrust-VET -
eTrust-VET (BETA) -
Ewido -
F-Prot -
F-Secure -
F-Secure (BETA) -
Fortinet -
Fortinet (BETA) -
Ikarus -
Kaspersky -
McAfee -
McAfee (BETA) -
Microsoft -
Nod32 -
Norman -
Panda Suspicious file
Panda (BETA) Suspicious file
QuickHeal -
Rising -
Sophos -
Symantec -
Symantec (BETA) -
Trend Micro -
Trend Micro (BETA) -
UNA Trojan.BAT.Small.BC0B
VBA32 -
VirusBuster -
WebWasher -
YY_Spybot Jupilites,,Installer

============================================================

As you can clearly see, hardly any of them detected anything at all, even the mighty Kaspersky failed to find anything in the file. So, what did I do, the same thing I always do when I find a new malware, I sent it off to all the anti-malware companies to add detection for it to their products.

Sorry, you want to know what it [the mawlare] does? OK.

The sting in the tail mentioned in the title of this posting, is not that the phishers have used a bit of extra social engineering to get a ‘phished‘ target to not only give away their personal and financial data, but they have also got them to download and run, what the end user thinks is a ‘useful‘ toolbar…when in fact what it does is:

Attempts to remove the first four boot configurations from the ‘boot.ini‘ file and then delete the ‘hal.dll‘ file in the Windows ‘System‘ directory. It then copies itself to the Windows ‘Startup‘ folder and proceeds to shutdown [reboot] the computer.

If it is successful this will make the infected computer unbootable and it may also show a rude message in Romanian on the screen.

Now, is that a sting in the tail or not?

Not only have the phishers made off with the users data, but they are also trying to cover their tracks by making the system unusable……any half decent ‘geek‘ could of course resolve the matter fairly easily, but most users would be completely stumped as how to proceed at this point. I suppose they would take it to their local PC expert or repair center?

October has come and it has been another very busy month for me. On the malware front it has been an interesting month with new techniques being used.

Like previous months, I will cover some statistics from my own sensors and compare those against those from a couple of major anti-virus companies, and finally I will cover new and interesting things that occurred during the month.

I have created some graphs and performed some trend analysis from the raw data from my WormCharmer and Bayesian filter.

I have included four sources of information for the graphs and pie-charts, these are:

• Kaspersky
• SOPHOS
• WormCharmer
• Malware Bayesian Filter

The last two are my own projects and all data is from the Internet, these systems are running on an aDSL link and are personal research projects that have been running for some time; WormCharmer 4 years, Malware Bayesian Filter 3 years.

In total I captured 886 samples during October, which have been catalogued as 54 distinct families and variants. In comparison during September I captured 1226 samples which were catalogued as 43 distinct families/variants. As you can see the captures in October are down from those of September.

During October I captured and submitted 3 brand new malware strains/variants [unknown to all or most AV companies at the time of submission].

The main reason for this general downward trend is that the malware authors are using other methods to initially seed their offspring, such as Instant Messaging and e-mail using links instead of attachments, and where attachments are used these tend to be droppers or downloaders which are crafted to evade anti-virus tools. This trend which started as a trickle at the start of the year is now a torrent. This means that real e-mail worms which use attachments are fast becoming an endangered species of malware.

During October I reported 140 new Phishing sites which are now included in the Netcraft phishing site database used by the Netcraft anti-phishing toolbar which I blogged about some time ago.

The first pie chart below shows the Top 10 distinct malware by percentage. Let us look at this in more detail:

W32/Tenga.3666 [Frisk] yet again retained the pole position during October. However, its percentage dropped, yet again, down from 57 percent in September to only 40.5 percent in October. Even allowing for this drop it seems very intent in keeping pole position for itself.

The Mytobs are definitely back. In August they completely dropped out of the chart, but one member of the family managed to storm back into the chart in September, grabbing second place. In October, Mytob.AC managed to keep hold of second spot, despite a number of challengers.

This reappearance of Mytob knocked Netsky.P from the second place it gained in August, back to third in September, and like Mytob.AC, is has consolidated its hold on this spot. Another member of the Netsky family [Netsky.AB] came into Octobers chart in fifth place.

The share-crawling worms which suffered a decrease in their numbers from seven of the ten slots in August to just four in September have managed to halt this decline. They still account for four of the ten places in October. The four are: Tenga.3666 in pole, Opaserv.worm.d in sixth, Opaserv.worm.ae in eighth and Dupator.1503 in ninth.

Mydoom reappeared in the chart during July with W32/Mydoom.o@MM jumping in to fifth spot. During October it regained one more spot from September, up from eighth to seventh.

The two new entries from September, known as IRC.Flood.b and ev [McAfee] have fallen back out of the top ten during October. They have been replaced by Warzov.gen3!W32DL and Bagle.fc!pwdzip in fourth and tenth places respectively.

If you compare the above to the data from Kaspersky and also the data from SOPHOS you may see some marked differences. Why? Well, simply my sample capture systems collect data from multiple ‘vectors’ and combine the data, so I tend to get a more rounded picture of what is really running round the Internet in the way of net nasties.

As you can see the top 10 from Kaspersky [below] October has seen the Mytob family completely disappear from the top ten. In September held four places out of the top ten.

Lovegate.w also falls out of the top ten in October along with Nyxem.E which was a new entry in Junes chart and has been in the top ten until now. Only one Netsky family member has survived the top ten shake-up that occurred in October, this being Netsky.q, which grabs pole.

Only one of the two new entries from September, both from the Scano family, have managed to stay in the top ten in October, this being Scano.gen, in fourth,with the aq variant replaced by another family member, this being the e variant, in tenth. Both of these variant arrive attached to a spammed e-mail message, the attachment is the virus. Scano does not spread on its own.

New entries this month include, three members of the Warezov family, these being, Warezov.dn in third spot, Warezov.ev in fifth, and Warezov.dc in seventh.

The rest of the chart is made up of Bagles; Bagle.gen in third and Bagle.mail in sixth, and Mydooms, Mydoom.l in eighth and Mydoom.m in ninth.

In the SOPHOS chart we see a different pattern; Netksy.p has further consolidated its number one slot which it lost in March and grabbed back in April. Zafi.b consolidated its place in eighth. Nyxem.D [aka MyWife] has slid down the chart from fourth to ninth. Mytob.AS has further consolidated its second place in the top ten, it stormed up the chart from fourth spot in June and we see two other Mytob family members in the top 10; this being C in sixth and E in tenth place. Another Netsky [D] consolidates its hold on fifth place. All members of the Mydoom family have fallen out of the top ten this month.

As with both my own top ten, and the top ten from Kaspersky, we have a couple of new entries, these being Stratio-Zip and Stratio-AY. Stratio is SOPHOS’s name for the warezov family, which is at least partially responsible for the recent jump in the amount of spam, but more on that next month.
To complete this month’s top ten we have W32.Bagle-Zip which was a new entry in June’s chart which slides down the chart from the third place which it grabbed in July, to fourth.

The final pie chart below shows the Top 10 malware families trapped by percentage. As you can see this includes not only mass-mailers but also share-crawling worms and bots. This month the table is headed up once more by the September 2005 leader Tenga, which has finally dropped from 57 percent in September 2006 to just 40.5 percent in October. Mytob is up one place to second after disappearing altogether from the chart in August and coming back in September in third. Operserv has slipped down one place from second to third place. Netsky has consolidated its hold on fourth. Mydoom drops out of the top ten. Dupator is up one space from eighth to seventh spot. Warezov is static in fifth place.

New entries include Downloader, Zapchat and Agent, in at eighth, ninth and tenth places respectively.

If you wish to see the current top 10, then see my external website at http://arachnid.homeip.net. The data which feeds the WormCharmer stats is updated every 3 minutes 24 hours a day [barring power-cuts, internet connectivity issues or hardware faults].

Please feel free to ask questions if you need any clarification on the data, the setup or whatever.

Now, let’s switch to a different method: The following graph shows the percentage of malware that I received and my Bayesian Filtering tool classified correctly. You can see the data for the whole of 2004, 2005 and 2006 [up to the end of October] here. This clearly shows that October was significantly down from September’s relative high. The overall trend is still downwards.

The raw statistics (both CSV and Graphed) can be found in the usual place on my site. If you feel you need access then please contact me to discuss.

If we look at the overall growth of malware so far this year, it grew from 168,807 [as at the end of December 2005] to 217,151 [as at the end of October 2006]. That’s a growth of 52,362 new malware strains and/or variants so far this year. We could see over 60,000 by the end of the year.

What’s New?
Instead of including commentary here about things I have already written about, I will offer links to other blog entries that may be of interest, topical, or cover some of the interesting occurrences in October 2006.

• An Orange Phish, not a Gold One
• Italian ex-Prime Minister Needs Your Help
• Do People Ever Learn From History?

Conclusions:
Malware, 419s and phishing scams have shown a significant drop in numbers during October, however this may not be all it seems as the amount of spam has grown almost fourfold in the same period.

Spammers are still increasing their use of graphical based spam, which is harder for anti-spam tools to identify without the use of OCR or other technologies; not only are they moving to graphical spam but to stop simple filtering based on hashing or check-summing of images, they are producing graphics that contain random micro-dots; this ensures that this type of filtering would be side-stepped. We have also seen animated GIF files being used by spammers, including some that use so-called subliminal programming techniques. We also saw spam being sent in Word documents. The latest trick is to use PNG files, instead of GIFs and also to use a graphic for each letter of the alphabet, sort of like a digital version of a ransom note cut from newspapers, but more on that next month.

Links:

• Virus Top Twenty for October 2006 [Kaspersky]
• Top ten viruses and hoaxes for October 2006 [Sophos]

Wow, must be my lucky day, according to an e-mail I’ve just received, I’ve won ‘1 Million US Dollars‘ and those of you that read my blog, will know that I’ve already been informed by another e-mail that I’ve already won ‘800,000 Euros‘ today!

Hang on, this is another lottery that is allegedly sponsored by Microsoft, and yet again I don’t remember entering any lottery!

Here are a couple of screenshots, showing the whole e-mail in all its glory:

Once more Bill Gates gets a mention, and the following line just makes me chuckle:

“DO NOT REPLY ANY OTHER MAILS LIKE THIS ON NET, AS THEY ARE LOT OF SCAM ARTIST OUT THERE PRETENDING TO BE US…”

Tell me about it, what a bunch of scammers!

Just to make it crystal clear, yet again, this is a scam, there is no money, and I haven’t really won anything…Damn, I suppose I better cancel that order for the Ferrari and the new guitars now?

Blimey, there’s that woman again [but she’s changed her name], from the 800,000 Euros wining e-mail, but now she has a friend with her. Anyone know who the women in the picture are, I’m sure they will be delighted to know that they are being used to help make a scam more believable?

Whoopee! I won 800,000 Euros in the latest lottery being run by Microsoft…..Imagine what I can do with that much money; buy a Ferrari [but I don’t drive, maybe I could learn?], pay off my mortgage, do a round-the-world trip, buy lots more spiders, snakes and guitars….Oh, and let my wife have some too!

Hang on, I don’t remember entering any lottery!

OK, calm down, this isn’t all it seems to be, as usual.

Yes, hopefully by now you’ve realised that it is the latest incarnation of the infamous lottery scam from those wonderful 419ers. The boys and girls from Lagos have excelled themselves once more. Yes, as usual they are using the name of a large company; Microsoft [in this case] but are also using another company name, that of the F. P. S. which they claim is the ‘Foundation for the Promotion of Software products’ [which doesn’t seem to exist outside these scams]. They even go on to use ‘Bill Gates‘ name as if that will give it more credence.

Here are a couple of screenshots, showing the whole e-mail in all its glory:

Just to make it crystal clear, this is a scam, there is no money, and I haven’t really won anything, well, apart from the right to read the latest ‘fiction‘ from those running these scams.

Anyone know who the woman in the picture ‘really‘ is?

By the way, I think that F.P.S really stands for ‘Foolish People Scammers‘? Any better suggestions?

P.S. I have a number of postings planned already for next week, including the ‘Monthly Malware Review’ for October, an interesting case of a Phishing Scam, with an extra sting in its tail, and another update on the latest tricks being employed by the spammers. If anything else interesting or newworthy crops up I’ll try and post that too.

In my never-ending search for the perfect RSS/Atom reader and/or aggregator, I have been testing the web based one offered by ‘Google‘ known as ‘Google Reader‘, and to be be honest I’m very impressed.

Apart from being browser based, it is similar to many of the other RSS readers out there, but there are some unusual, but useful things that ‘Google Reader‘ does that I don’t think any of the others offer.

One of the great features is the ability to ‘share‘ items that you have received, and think may be of interest to like-minded individuals. So, I have started sharing interesting posts from blogs that I subscribe to here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/01333213474642457866

You can even get it as a RSS/Atom feed via this link: http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/01333213474642457866/state/com.google/broadcast.

‘Google Reader‘ works well in Internet Explorer, but also works in Firefox too.

If you are also using ‘Google Reader‘, and have a share, then let me know and I’ll take a look. Also, let me know what you think of ‘Google Reader‘, if you use it.

Just for interest, here are just some of the other RSS/Atom readers and/or aggregators I’ve used so far [in no particular order]::

• Awasu
• Firefox, Live bookmarks, Sage and various other plug-ins/add-ons
• RSS Bandit
• Greatnews
• KlipFolio
• Newzie
• Omea reader
• Opera
• SharpReader

If you are also using ‘Google Reader‘, and have a share, then let me know and I’ll take a look. Also, let me know what you think of ‘Google Reader‘, if you use it.

I have written a number of blog entries about the newer tricks being used by those that love to clog up the internet and more personally, our inboxes with the scourge of Spam!

We have been seeing a rather massive increase in the quantity of spam, as well as more graphical spam, which the spammers seem to be using more and more in place of ASCII text, HTML and the usual obfuscation tricks and techniques to try and fool the anti-spam tools many of us use.

Just to prove the point that spam has increased, here is a chart that clearly shows the current increase [Source: David Hart]:

The full chart can be found here on David’s own web site.

Here is a very sobering quote from an article from ‘The Register‘, about this massive rise: ‘Spam black list maintainer Total Quality Management Cubed has seen a 450 percent increase in spam in two months, and the amount of spam filtered out every week by security software maker Sunbelt Software has more than tripled compared to six months ago.‘

If you don’t believe this, then here’s another article with other people saying much the same thing.

What’s behind this massive surge? Well, no prizes for guessing that the main culprits are the many botnets that are increasingly being used to send out the vast swathes of spam that we are seeing. However, there have been two new malware strains that may also be, at least partially, responsible for the recent and sudden increase. The new malware in the spotlight are, the SpamThru trojan and the massive number of variants of Warezov.

If you want to see how bots are used to send spam, then take a look at this blog article from the McAfee AVERT Labs blog.

So, now we know what the probable causes for the massive increase in spam are, let us now look at the latest tricks being used by those hated miscreants; the spammers:

All the following screenshot of actual spam e-mails I have personally received have been sanitised, to hide the e-mail addresses that received them [mine]; this is to stop spammers sending me even more spam than they do now [over 93 percent of all mail I now get is spam], and secondly to not assist them in advertising the websites they sell their ‘crud‘ from.

Here is a screenshot of a new hybrid spam [graphical and text] that I’m seeing quite a lot of right now:

A larger version can be found here.

This particular spam is using multiple tricks; a graphic with the actual spam message [in this case, each letter in a coloured box, is a separate graphic], and text taken from books or websites, above and below the image file[s]. Why? Well this is a common trick to try and fool anti-spam filters, especially, in this case Bayesian classifiers. They have even thrown in a string on random characters, just to try and confuse filters, or so they think!

Here is a screenshot of a new graphical spam, which uses a new technique to try and slip past anti-spam filters. As with the previous example, I’m seeing quite a lot of this right now:

A larger version can be found here.

The above graphical spam is different from what we had seen so far, in that unlike previous graphical spam, this one doesn’t rely on a hyperlink [URL] in the body of the e-mail, again this move is to try and make the job of filtering out spam harder. Instead, the graphical spam tells you to manually type in the URL in your browser, to go to the site being advertised. The url in the displayed box is even animated, showing one character at a time, as if it was being typed.

There is a variant of the one above, that uses the ‘random text/sentence’ trick from the first example, as well as the graphic seen in the second example.

Did you think that because of the rise in the use of graphic based spam, that ASCII or HTML based spam was dead? Well, think again, it is diminishing, however, as the following screenshot of ASCII based spam shows, the spammers still use it and it can still bypass anti-spam filters:

Yes, it is just ASCII text characters, well apart from the URL at the top, which takes you to their website.

So, how do we defeat the spammers and get our inboxes back? Well, I covered a number of tricks and tools in my blog posting entitled ‘Do You Like SPAM?‘

As a final thought on how the spammers can be defeated, here’s a quote, again from ‘The Register’ article mentioned previously: Hart argues that, if no one bought the goods hawked by spammers, then the incentive for bulk emailers would rapidly go away. The message is simple, he added.

“If you don’t like spam, then don’t do business with spammers.”

If this sounds familiar, well regular readers of this blog will know that I said the same thing quite a while ago [almost 16 months ago to be exact], here it is: ‘Never buy anything from a SPAM e-mail, it will only make the problem worse.‘ Yes, it is from the ‘Do You Like SPAM‘ entry I mentioned above, how’s that for a good tie-in?

Over the last 36 hours I’ve been seeing almost nothing but phishing scams aimed at Barclays Bank [British Bank]. Yes, I’m still seeing eBay and PayPal phishes too, even eGold and the odd HSBC one as well.

Here is a screenshot of a typical Barclays phishing scam that I’m seeing by the bucket load:

A larger version can be found here.

The more observant out there may have noticed that the ‘From:’ address has been forged to look like it has come from ‘Barclays plc cust-support-484375@barclays.co.uk‘. This is to try and convince the intended tartget that this has come from Barclays, when in fact it has come from, in this instance, ‘home (71.126.84.130)‘, which is probably a system that is part of a botnet.

The actual text in the e-mail is not text at all, it is a graphic file, there is usually text in the e-mails body, but it is random clippings in the colour #FFFFF3, #FFFFF2 and #FFFFF4 [which looks cream]. The only other thing in the e-mail body is a hyperlink [URL] to the phishing site, which is not the URL shown on the graphic!

Here’s an example of what the ‘hidden’ [cream] text is in the sample that I took the screeshot from:

hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it?
father or furtherer of a new order of beings, whose road must lead
which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops;
it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is

At this point the actual graphics file is in GIF format, but this may well change.

So, if you are a Barclays customer be on your guard as it seems that the phishers are spending significant amounts of their time to try and get you to disclose your internet banking details…. This is not surprising as a recent report has shown that internet fraud was up 55 percent in the UK from the previous year!

Obviously, to those behind these scams, these are Gold Phish! Don’t get hooked.

A number of people have asked me for my opinion on the built-in anti-phishing features of both Internet Explorer 7 [IE7] and Firefox 2.0.

They are particularly interested in how good, or bad, they are when compared against one of the most mature and accurate anti-phishing toolbars, this being the one from Netcraft.

So, I managed to spend a bit of time testing both browsers in-built anti-phishing capabilities, the results although not that surprising, were somewhat worrying when you take into account the amount of phishing that is now taking place.

The screeshots below are the results of just one test, but are indicative of the general accuracy of the built-in anti-phishing tools when used instead of the Netcraft toolbar. This is by no means a scientific test. However, I do use the built-in Firefox 2.0 anti-phishing [via Google] feature and the Netcraft toolbar, which co-exist well.

I received a new, for me, phishing scam e-mail which I used as a test for all the anti-phishing features and the Netcraft toolbar, and you can see the results for each of the browsers and tools below:

All the screenshots used in this blog entry have had the URL for the phishing site ‘munged‘, just in case anyone is mad enough to try and visit them

First up is Internet Explorer 7, the latest version of the much-maligned web browser from our old friends at Microsoft. However, you can only install and use IE7 on Windows XP, and even then only if you have Service Pack 2 [SP2] installed.

A larger version of the above screenshot can be found here.

As you can see, with this particular Barclays Bank phish, IE7 doesn’t flag it or warn us in any way that this is a bogus site, and not the real Barclays bank site, not good!

Next up is Firefox 2.0, the latest version of the much-admired, and recommended, web browser from our friends at Mozilla.org. Unlike IE7, you can only install and use Firefox 2.0 on most versions of Windows and even [gasp] Linux and other *NIX flavours too!

A larger version of the above screenshot can be found here.

As you can see, with this particular Barclays Bank phish, Firefox 2.0 does flag and warns us in a very obvious, in your face, kind of way that this is a bogus site, and not the real Barclays bank site, very good!

Staying with Firefox 2.0, let us now disable the in-built anti-phishing facility, and install the latest Netcraft anti-phishing toolbar instead. This works with both Internet Explorer [IE], including version 7, and all Fdoesn’tirefox versions up to and including 2.0. Not only that, but I have found that it will happily co-exist with the in-built anti-phishing feature in Firefox 2.0.

A larger version of the above screenshot can be found here.

As you can see, with this particular Barclays Bank phish, the Netcraft toolbar in Firefox 2.0 not only flags the site, warning us in a very obvious with a large dialogue box, it also doesn’t even allow the page time to render, which is good if there were any nasty scripts embedded in the HTML of the bogus site!

So, in conclusion, the in-built anti-phishing, in all the tests I’ve done so far with the many new phishing scams I get each and every day, in IE7 is really not very good, but in Firefox 2.0 [if using the Google option], is not bad, but neither of the in-built anti-phishing features are as good as using the Netcraft anti-phising toolbar…why?

Well, partly because they get lots of reports from researchers and end-users from all over the net, including me, and we are talking about thousands of new phishing URLS being reported each and every month, and furthermore because their toolbar is not tied to a specific browser this actually help them to get more reports, even from those that insist on still using IE6

For those fans of Opera out there in blogland, the news is that the next version of Opera will have some form of in-built anti-phising feature.

As with most security solutions, you shouldn’t rely on a single layer to protect your computer from attack, be that malware, spam or scams.

You should be using multiple overlapping techniques and/or technologies to ensure that a single point of failure is not likely to result in your defences being breached. So, by all means use the in-built anti-phishing features in IE7 or Firefox 2.0, but augment them with the Netcraft anti-phishing tool and a good dose of safe hex too….belt and braces, that way you are less likely to embarrassed by a failure which would otherwise expose your assets. You wouldn’t want those exposed or frozen, now would you?

Orange, a rather large UK mobile phone operator, are running a promotion and offering £20 [UK Pounds] of free credit if you use their new e-topup service….or so the following e-mail [screenshot below] which arrived in my e-mail box the other day would have me believe.

If an ‘Orange’ customer clicks on the link in the e-mail, they will see the following page in their browser:

A larger version of the above screenshot can be found here.

Yes, the bad guys and girls are changing tactics again. In this case it is a phish which is targeting one of the big mobile phone operators in the UK, more accurately, they are targeting their customers.

The phishing e-mail appears to be a typical one except that it is targeting ‘Orange’ customers instead of the usual bank, building society, ISP, Paypal or eBay ones that are the more normal phish food.

As you can see, apart from the usual data, such as name address, etc. They also want your credit card details, including the CVV!

So, heads-up everyone as it looks like we will be seeing more unusual phish in the future.

Anyway, I have other ‘phish to phry‘, back later!

Following hot on the heals of the August Malware Review, here is the Monthly Malware Review for September 2006, just in time for me to think about starting the process all over again for the October Malware Review!

September has come and it has been a very busy month for me, writing and updating a number of presentations, one for the Virus Bulletin conference, one for the University of Warwick and one for a customer visit. This is on top of my usual work! On the malware front it has been an interesting month with new techniques being used.

Like previous months, I will cover some statistics from my own sensors and compare those against those from a couple of major anti-virus companies, and finally I will cover new and interesting things that occurred during the month.

I have created some graphs and performed some trend analysis from the raw data from my WormCharmer and Bayesian filter.

I have included four sources of information for the graphs and pie-charts, these are:

• Kaspersky
• SOPHOS
• WormCharmer
• Malware Bayesian Filter

The last two are my own projects and all data is from the Internet, these systems are running on an aDSL link and are personal research projects that have been running for some time; WormCharmer 4 years, Malware Bayesian Filter 3 years.

In total I captured 1226 samples during September, which have been catalogued as 43 distinct families and variants. In comparison during August I captured 948 samples which were catalogued as 40 distinct families/variants. As you can see the captures in September are back up, a bit.

During September I captured and submitted just 1 brand new malware strains/variants [unknown to all or most AV companies at the time of submission].

The main reason for this general downward trend is that the malware authors are using other methods to initially seed their offspring, such as Instant Messaging and e-mail using links instead of attachments, and where attachments are used these tend to be droppers or downloaders which are crafted to evade anti-virus tools. This trend which started as a trickle at the start of the year is now a torrent. This means that real e-mail worms which use attachments are fast becoming an endangered species of malware.

During September I reported 85 new Phishing sites which are now included in the Netcraft phishing site database used by the Netcraft anti-phishing toolbar which I blogged about some time ago.

The first pie chart below shows the Top 10 distinct malware by percentage. Let us look at this in more detail:

W32/Tenga.3666 [Frisk] retained the pole position again during September. However, its percentage dropped from 72 percent in August to only 57 percent in September. Even allowing for this drop it seems very intent in keeping pole position for itself.

The Mytobs are back. In August they completely dropped out of the chart, but one member of the family has managed to storm back into the chart in September, grabbing second place.

This reappearance of Mytob knocked Netsky.P from last month second place, back to third. Another member of the Netsky family [Netsky.c] came into Septembers chart in fourth place.

Interestingly, the share-crawling worms suffered a decrease in their numbers; down from seven of the ten slots in August to just four in September.

Mydoom reappeared in the chart during July with W32/Mydoom.o@MM jumping in to fifth spot. During September it fell down the chart again, to eighth.

We have two new entries this month, known as IRC.Flood.b and ev [McAfee]. These jumped into the chart in fifth and sixth places respectively. These IRC flooders are included as part of a multi-component self-extracting archive [using RAR]. These are commonly being disguised as links to ‘e-cards’. However, when the link is clicked on and the alleged ‘e-card’ is launched, instead of seeing a electronic greeting card, the downloaded file un-archives the files contained inside it and installs a number of malware, including bot components, rootkit files and IRC flooders. This underlines the move by the malware authors back towards using Trojans as their preferred malware type.

If you compare the above to the data from Kaspersky and also the data from SOPHOS you may see some marked differences. Why? Well, simply my sample capture systems collect data from multiple ‘vectors’ and combine the data, so I tend to get a more rounded picture of what is really running round the Internet in the way of net nasties.

As you can see the top 10 from Kaspersky [below] this month has seen the Mytob family once more grab four places out of the top ten, this is down from six in August.

In pole position we still have Mytob.c, which was also number one for the last six months. Lovegate.w moves up one place from fourth to third place. Nyxem.E which was a new entry in Junes chart has consolidated its hold on second place. Netsky.b drops from its third slot it grabbed in July and August to fifth, and is joined by another member of its family, Netsky.t in ninth place.

We have two new entries in September, both from the Scano family, both of these [gen and aq in fourth and eight respectively] arrive attached to a spammed e-mail message, the attachment is the virus. Scano does not spread on its own.

The rest of the chart is made up of Mytob variants [t, u, and w] in sixth, seventh and tenth place respectively.

In the SOPHOS chart we see a different pattern; Netksy.p has further consolidated its number one slot which it lost in March and grabbed back in April. Zafi.b slides back up one place from ninth to eighth. Nyxem.D[aka MyWife] has further consolidated it place in fourth. Mytob.AS has further consolidated its second place in the top ten, it stormed up the chart from fourth spot in June and we see two other Mytob family members appear in the top 10; these being E and C in sixth and seventh place respectively. Another Netsky [D] consolidates its hold on fifth place. We have two members of the Mydoom family in the top ten again this month, this being Mydoom.O which slips from eighth to ninth spot and Mydoom.AJ which just gets in to the chart in tenth. To complete this month’s top ten we have W32.Bagle-Zip which was a new entry in June’s chart which consolidates its third place which it grabbed in July.

The final pie chart below shows the Top 10 malware families trapped by percentage. As you can see this includes not only mass-mailers but also share-crawling worms and bots. This month the table is headed up once more by the September 2005 leader Tenga, which has finally dropped from 72 percent in August to just 57 percent in September. Mytob is back in the chart at third place after disappearing altogether from the chart in August. Operserv has further consolidated its grip on second place. Netsky is down one place from third to fourth. Mydoom slips from the fifth place it managed to grab in July and August to sixth. Dupator is static in eighth spot. IRC Generic Flooder slips from fourth to seventh. New entries IRC Flood and Warezov come in at fifth and tenth places respectively. Kapser aka Mywife.D has re-entered the top ten this month in ninth place.

If you wish to see the current top 10, then see my external website at http://arachnid.homeip.net. The data which feeds the WormCharmer stats is updated every 3 minutes 24 hours a day [barring power-cuts, internet connectivity issues or hardware faults].

Please feel free to ask questions if you need any clarification on the data, the setup or whatever.

Now, let’s switch to a different method: The following graph shows the percentage of malware that I received and my Bayesian Filtering tool classified correctly. You can see the data for the whole of 2004, 2005 and 2006 [up to the end of September] here. This clearly shows that September was the busiest month since June. The overall trend is still downwards.

The raw statistics (both CSV and Graphed) can be found in the usual place on my site. If you feel you need access then please contact me to discuss.

If we look at the overall growth of malware so far this year, it grew from 168,807 [as at the end of December 2005] to 213,407 [as at the end of August 2006]. That’s a growth of 48,616 new malware strains and/or variants so far this year. We could see over 60,000 by the end of the year.

What’s New?
Instead of including commentary here about things I have already written about, I will offer links to other blog entries that may be of interest, topical, or cover some of the interesting occurrences in September 2006.

• Developments in Spam and Spamming

Conclusions:
Malware picked up slightly in September along with spam, however both 419 and phishing scams have shown a small drop in numbers. The growth in malware, including spyware which uses rootkit [cloaking/stealth] techniques is becoming a major problem and corporations need to address this now before it gets completely out of control with widespread infestations throughout their infrastructure.

Rootkits will be covered in more depth in next months report, including a link to a paper I will present at the Virus Bulletin 2006 conference in October.

As shown elsewhere in this report spammers are increasingly moving to using graphical spam as it is harder for anti-spam tools to identify without the use of OCR technologies; not only are they moving to graphical spam but to stop simple filtering based on hashing or check-summing of images, they are producing graphics that contain random micro-dots; this ensures that this type of filtering would be side-stepped. We have also seen animated GIF files being used by spammers, including some that use so-called subliminal programming techniques. We also saw spam being sent in Word documents. The latest trick is to use PNG files, instead of GIFs.

Links:

• Virus Top Twenty for September 2006 [Kaspersky]
• Top ten viruses and hoaxes for September 2006 [Sophos]

As previously mentioned on this blog, I had a paper selected for the Virus Bulletin 2006 conference, which was held at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada, between the 11th and 13th of October [Yes, that was a Friday; Friday the 13th, and knowing the recent spate of problems that the VB Conference has experienced since 2001, it seemed that they were tempting fate once more!]

This posting is a quick review of the conference and as promised a link to the full paper which I wrote for, and presented at, the conference:

Day 1 - Wednesday the 11th of October:

The first day of the conference started at 10:30 with Helen Martin’s opening address, this was followed at 11:00 by Mikko Hypponen who gave his keynote speech, which was entitled ‘Case: Virus X‘, which he informed us he couldn’t now talk about due to legal restrictions. So, instead he did a presentation covering the major developments of malware since the start of the problem, almost exactly 20 years ago. It was a very interesting presentation, given in an unusual but very effective style. He used 164 slides in just 40 minutes!

The next session was also interesting, a presentation by Rob Murawski of the CERT Coordination Centre on ‘Data exfiltration techniques: how attackers steal your sensitive data‘. This talk sort of set the tone of the rest of the conference, as it covered cyber-crime, of which we would hear a number of talks about - from different perspectives.

After lunch, the conference split into its normal two stream mode; Corporate stream and Technical steam. Normally I spend most of the conference in the technical stream, but for a number of reasons I spent the rest of the first day in the corporate stream instead.

The first talk in the afternoon that I attended was a slightly controversial one to say the least, on user education, given by Stefan Gorling. His talk was entitled: ‘The myth of user education‘. The focus of his talk was on how it was “pointless” to try and educate end users.

The very next presentation was also on user education, given by Peter Cooper and entitled: ‘User education: teaching techniques and learning styles for damage limitation‘. This very ‘memorable‘ presentation approached user education from the opposite side, saying that anyone can be trained, given the right approach. The presentation was memorable for two reasons, it used a new technique that I hadn’t seen used before, the 10/20/30 method which Peter assured us would make it a memorable presentation, and secondly because just as he mentioned about his presentation being memorable his MAC laptop shut down! This lead many of the audience to ask Peter after his talk whether this was purely coincidental or part of his presentation.

Then it was time for a tea break, which I used to setup my laptop for my presentation, which was the next one on the ‘Corporate stream‘. While I was setting up, I was asked for my opinion on ‘user education’ by a delegate, and I mentioned that I agreed with both of the previous speakers. I continued to say that I, like Stefan, thought that generally trying to educate end users on the technical side of malware was a waste of time; for most end-users anyway. But, that with infinite time and resources then they should be educated, but mainly on simple policies and procedures, rather than the specific details of a specific threat, which most of them are not interested in, or even want to know about. Only a few days later did I find out that the ‘delegate’ was a journalist; he never introduced himself and his badge was obscured, and I was distracted in setting up my laptop - slightly sneaky of him!

So, as you may have guessed by now, my presentation [’Rootkits: risks, issues and prevention‘] was next, however we started 5 minutes late. This meant I never got to use my last 3-4 slides. Overall, I think the presentation went well as I had a number of people approach me and tell me they had enjoyed it and/or discuss some aspects in more detail. I also received very positive feedback on the actual paper too.

My presentation was followed by Matthew Braverman, who spoke about ‘Behavioural modelling of social engineering based malicious software‘. This was another excellent presentation and rounded off the end of the first day in the ‘Corporate stream‘.

Later in the evening we had a welcome drinks reception, which gave us a chance to chat more and discuss what we had seen or heard so far, catch up with old friends, make new friends and contacts and generally chew-the-cud in a geeky/nerdy sort of way. Oh, and enjoy a drink or two to help keep the brain lubricated.

Day 2 - Thursday the 12th of October:

For the first three sessions of the second day, I decided to stay in the ‘Technical Stream‘, these were:

• Full potential of dynamic binary translation for AV emulation engine - Presented by Jim Wu
• Anti-rootkit safeguards and methods of their bypassing - Presented by Aleksander Czarnowski
• Botnet tracking techniques and tools - Presented by Jose Nazario

The last two of these presentations caused quite a bit of discussion, especially Aleksanders, which was picked up by the press and numerous articles appeared on specific points he raised about fooling Vista. His paper was also a really good technical look at rootkits, which sort of complimented my own one on the same subject.

For the next two sessions of the second day, I decided to switch back to the ‘Corporate Stream‘, these were:

• The challenge of detecting and removing installed threats - Presented by Jason Bruce
• Dirty money on the wires: the business models of cyber criminals - Presented by Guillaume Lovet

The last of these presentations caused quite a bit of discussion as Guillaume had a quote that claimed that cyber-crime was more profitable now to the ‘Mob‘ than drugs! I’ll post more on this when I get a copy of his slides.

After lunch, I decided to stay in the ‘Corporate stream‘, partly because I was chairing the first two sessions, and then the final two presentations on the ‘Corporate stream‘ were the most interesting. Oh, and then there was a panel discussion.

• The game goes on: an analysis of modern spam techniques - Presented by Rob Thomas and Dmitry Samosseiko
• Containing spam - the local challenge - Presented by Jay Goldin
• Spy-phishing - a new breed of blended threats - Presented by Jamz Yaneza
• Phishing trojan creation toolkits: an analysis of the technical capabilities and the criminal organizations behind them - Presented by Dmitri Alperovitch
• Panel discussion: Anti-Spyware Coalition - working together to combat spyware - Chaired by Richard Baldry

As you can see the afternoon was full of spam and phish, and we’d already had lunch!

After this there was a special ‘Birds of a feather‘ session on tackling graphical spam, which was lively and very interesting.

The end of day 2 was rounded off by the Gala Dinner; good food and wine were supplied, and more nerdy/geeky chat too. The after dinner entertainment was supplied by jugglers and acrobats and rounded off by a good band.

Day 3 - Friday the 13th of October:

The last day of the conference was ahead of us, the first two days had gone past so quickly, so much to digest, both physically and mentally! On the final day I was in the ‘‘ for the first three presentations and then switched back to the ‘Technical stream‘ for the rest of the day. The ones I attended on the the corporate stream were:

• Applying collaborative anti-spam techniques to anti-virus - Presented by Adam J. O’Donnell
• The inspector: automating the forensic investigation of infected computers - Presented by John Morris and Eric Kedrosky
• Can strong authentication sort out phishing and fraud? - Presented by Paul Ducklin

The last two were the most interesting with John and Eric showing how they had used free scanning/forensic tools to remotely inspect systems that were suspected of being infected. These tools were scripted and for the most part automated, nice work guys, and no I won’t be writing a paper on how to improve the system, this time!

Paul’s presentation was great and informative, as we have all come to expect from such a knowledgeable guy who is also a very animated presenter.

Switching back to the ‘Technical stream‘ for the final talk before lunch, I sat in on:

• Macintosh OSX binary malware - Presented by Marius van Oers

During lunch the speakers photo was taken, here it is:

I’m right in the center of the front row [blue checked shirt and white trainers], next to me in the red sleeveless top is Michael Morgan and next to him is Morton Swimmer. The other side of me is Paul Ducklin and then Dr. Richard Ford. A full version of this picture, naming all of those in it, will be available on the Virus Bulletin site as soon as they have collated all commented all the pictures they have from the conference and of Montreal itself.

After lunch I stayed on the ‘Technical stream‘, the presentations I saw were:

• SymbOS malware classification problems - Presented by Dr Vesselin Bontchev
• A deep look into Symbian threats - Presented by Robert X. Wang
• Me code write good - the l33t skillz of the virus writer - Presented by John Canavan
• Panel discussion: Fighting cybercrime: one size does NOT fit all!. - ‘The Internet Strike Force’, led by David Perry

Although the presentations on Symbian were interesting there was little new information in them. The best of the afternoon session was the panel on Cybercrime led by the animated and funny Dave Perry in his ‘Internet Strike Force‘ bowling shirt.

And then it was the final session of the day, and of the whole conference:

• Conference closing session - Presented by Helen Martin

All in all, this was a very good Virus Bulletin conference, although I felt that the ‘technical stream‘ was the poorest I had ever seen, with only a small number of interesting papers and presenters this year. However, this was offset by the number of excellent papers and presentations given on the ‘Corporate stream‘, and I’ve been at nine of the last eleven VB conferences. Even allowing for this, there is still nothing quite like a VB conference, and long may it continue! I’m already looking forward to next years and thinking up possible papers to submit abstracts for possible selection for VB2007, which will be held in Vienna, Austria!

And even though the conference ran on Friday the 13th, there were no problems, no disasters, outbreaks of diseases, hurricanes, confiscated mugs, and so on, it all went very smoothly - well apart from Peter Cooper’s MAC laptop that crashed on the first day; Wednesday the 11th, so it doesn’t count. And, there were no major virus/malware outbreaks either during VB, that in itself is rather spooky!

Just in case you didn’t spot the link to my paper, here it is again: Rootkits: Risks, Issues and Prevention

I would be keen to hear from others who attended VB2006, at least to find out what they thought of the conference content this year.

Here’s a new one I received today, and I just had to post it; screenshot below - don’t tell anyone, it is supposed to be a secret:

A larger screenshot, for those of us that need it, can be found here.

Poor old Mr Berlusconi needs your help in moving some ‘funds’ before they all get frozen by the authorities investigating him for alleged ‘fraud’. Poor man, don’t you feel sorry for him?

Well, whether he is innocent or guilty is irrelevant, as far as it has to do with this request anyway. Why? Well, guess what, the e-mail isn’t from Mr Berlusconi, or indeed anyone acting on his behalf. Are you surprised? Well, you shouldn’t be…Shame on you!

The e-mail is just the latest use of a well known person [well, at least in Europe], to use as bait by those inventive boys and girls from Lagos, also known as the 419ers. This is just their later scam e-mail. There is no money, if you get involved with this, then the money will only be flowing one way, from you to them.

Don’t you just love the wording “…rest assured that this transaction would be done legally…“, yeah right, and since when has it been legal to launder money, even if it really existed?

Finally, here is the Mothly Malware Review for August 2006, better late than never? OK, I own up, I wrote it and then forgot to post it here, happy now?

August has come and you can feel the start of autumn in the air in the evenings and mornings. On the malware front it has been an interesting month with new techniques being used.

Like previous months, I will cover some statistics from my own sensors and compare those against those from a couple of major anti-virus companies, and finally I will cover new and interesting things that occurred during the month.

I have created some graphs and performed some trend analysis from the raw data from my WormCharmer and Bayesian filter.

I have included four sources of information for the graphs and pie-charts, these are:

• Kaspersky
• SOPHOS
• WormCharmer
• Malware Bayesian Filter

The last two are my own projects and all data is from the Internet, these systems are running on an aDSL link and are personal research projects that have been running for some time; WormCharmer 4 years, Malware Bayesian Filter 3 years.

In total I captured 948 samples during August, which have been catalogued as 40 distinct families and variants. In comparison during July I captured 1358 samples which were catalogued as 42 distinct families/variants. As you can see the captures in August have fallen to the lowest since I started to record the samples I captured.

During August I captured and submitted 4 brand new malware strains/variants [unknown to all or most AV companies at the time of submission].

The main reason for this slow down is that the malware authors are using other methods to initially seed their offspring, such as Instant Messaging and e-mail using links instead of attachments, and where attachments are used these tend to be droppers or downloaders which are crafted to evade anti-virus tools. This trend which started as a trickle at the start of the year is now a torrent. This means that real e-mail worms which use attachments are fast becoming an endangered species of malware.

During August I reported 74 new Phishing sites which are now included in the Netcraft phishing site database used by the Netcraft anti-phishing toolbar which I blogged about some time ago.

The first pie chart below shows the Top 10 distinct malware by percentage. Let us look at this in more detail:

W32/Tenga.3666 [Frisk] retained the pole position again during August. Its percentage jumped from 71 percent in July to 72 percent in August. It seems very intent in keeping pole position for itself.

Netsky.P jumped up from last month third place to second, replacing the Mytob variant that held it in July.

The Mytobs lost even more ground during August, completely dropping out of the chart.

The share-crawling worms increased their position from July gaining an extra slice of the pie, up from six to seven. The Opaserv family also increased its hold on the top ten accounting for six of the seven places taken by share-crawling worms and bots.

Mydoom reappeared in the chart during July with W32/Mydoom.o@MM jumping in to fifth spot. During August it fell two places to seventh.

We have a new entry this month, known as W32/Virtool.GL [Frisk]. This jumped into the chart in sixth place and is a collection of malware which uses social engineering to get users to download the malware from a website and infect their computer; in other words these are Trojans not viruses or worms. This underlines the move by the malware authors back towards using Trojans as their preferred malware type.

If you compare the above to the data from Kaspersky and also the data from SOPHOS you may see some marked differences. Why? Well, simply my sample capture systems collect data from multiple ‘vectors’ and combine the data, so I tend to get a more rounded picture of what is really running round the Internet in the way of net nasties.

As you can see the top 10 from Kaspersky [below] this month has seen the the Mytob family once more grab six places out of the top ten, this is the same number it managed in June and July, up from five in May.

In pole position we still have Mytob.c, which was also number one for the last five months. Lovegate.w moves up one place from fifth to fourth place. Nyxem.E which was a new entry in Junes chart has consolidated its hold on second place. Netsky.b likewise retains its third slot it grabbed in July, and is joined by another member of its family, Netsky.y in eighth place which also featured in July’s chart. The rest of the chart is made up of Mytob variants [u, q, w, t, and cg] in fifth, sixth, seventh, ninth and tenth place respectively.

In the SOPHOS chart we see a different pattern; Netksy.p has further consolidated its number one slot which it lost in March and grabbed back in April. Zafi.b slips three places from sixth place to ninth. Nyxem.D[aka MyWife] has consolidated it place in fourth. Mytob.AS consolidates its second place in the top ten, it stormed up the chart from fourth spot in June. Mytob FO slips from ninth to tenth and we see two other Mytob family members appear back in the top 10; these being C and E in sixth and seventh place respectively. Another Netsky [D] jumps from seventh place to fifth. We have only one member of the Mydoom family in the top ten this month, down from two in July; this being Mydoom.O which slips from fifth to eighth spot. To complete this month’s top ten we have W32.Bagle-Zip which was a new entry in June’s chart which consolidates its third place which it grabbed in July.

The final pie chart below shows the Top 10 malware families trapped by percentage. As you can see this includes not only mass-mailers but also share-crawling worms and bots. This month the table is headed up once more by the September 2005 leader Tenga, which has climbed from 71 percent in July to over 72 percent in August. Mytob has disappeared from the chart altogether in August. Operserv has consolidated its grip on second place. Netsky is up one place from fourth to third. Mydoom consolidates its fifth place it managed to grab in July. Dupator is also static in eighth spot. New entries W32.VirTool, W32.Downloader, IRC Generic Flooder and Trojan.Downloader.Win32.Banload come in at fourth, sixth, seventh and tenth places respectively. Funlove has fallen out of the top ten this month.

If you wish to see the current top 10, then see my external website at http://arachnid.homeip.net. The data which feeds the WormCharmer stats is updated every 3 minutes 24 hours a day [barring power-cuts, internet connectivity issues or hardware faults].

Please feel free to ask questions if you need any clarification on the data, the setup or whatever.

Now, let’s switch to a different method: The following graph shows the percentage of malware that I received and my Bayesian Filtering tool classified correctly. You can see the data for the whole of 2004, 2005 and 2006 [up to the end of August] here. This clearly shows that August was the slowest month since I started to collate data on e-mail borne malware, even worse than July.

The raw statistics (both CSV and Graphed) can be found in the usual place on my site. If you feel you need access then please contact me to discuss.

If we look at the overall growth of malware so far this year, it grew from 168,807 [as at the end of December 2005] to 208,517 [as at the end of August 2006]. That’s a growth of 39,710 new malware strains and/or variants in last eight months.

What’s New?
Instead of including commentary here about things I have already written about, I will offer links to other blog entries that may be of interest or cover some of the interesting occurrences in August 2006.

• Is Anti-Virus Software ‘Past Its Sell By Date’?!
• A Lebanese Request To Liberate 24 Million US Dollars

Conclusions:
Malware slowed again during August; however spam and phishing scams have shown a further increase, with only 419 scams showing a small drop in numbers. The growth in malware, including spyware which uses rootkit [cloaking/stealth] techniques is becoming a major problem and corporations need to address this now before it gets completely out of control with widespread infestations throughout their infrastructure.

It is also clear that cyber-criminals are increasingly using Trojans as their preferred attack tool, rather than viruses. It also seems that phishers are increasingly looking at using malware to enable them to steal personal data as well as other technologies that may help them to fool their victims.

Spammers are increasingly moving to using graphical spam as it is harder for anti-spam tools to identify without the use of OCR technologies; not only are they moving to graphical spam but to stop simple filtering based on hashing or check-summing of images, they are producing graphics that contain random micro-dots; this ensures that this type of filtering would be side-stepped. We have also seen animated GIF files being used by spammers, including some that use so-called subliminal programming techniques. We also saw spam being sent in Word documents. I will cover both of these developments in September’s malware review, which I’m writing right now, and should be posted here by the end of the week.

Links:

• Virus Top Twenty for August 2006 [Kaspersky]
• Top ten viruses and hoaxes for August 2006 [Sophos]

When I guest lecture at a University, give a presentation to customers, or at conferences I often mention the need to understand what has already happened in the field of malware and anti-malware to understand what has or has not worked in the past.

I often state “why is it that many people never use history as a tool to stop them, or others [their organisation, society, nation, and so on] from repeating the same mistakes that have already been made at least once, and sometimes, many times over?“.

At this point, I often get quizzical looks from between 10 and 50 percent of the audience, it seems that they don’t get it.

When I get to ‘Trojan Horses’ I quickly cover the pertinent facts of how the Greeks finally took the city of Troy, and then you can see the same people, who possibly thought I was mad or slightly deranged, suddenly get it……

Modern ‘Trojan Horses’ are not large wooden sculptures, or lawn ornaments, but computer programs that claim to do one thing [something useful or wanted], but when run they do something the user is not expecting, such as lowering or removing your digital defences [Anti-Virus, Personal firewall, anti-spyware], stealing data, deleting files, installing other malware, and so on…Effectively raping and pillaging your computer or network.

Just like the people of Troy, users of computers are inviting in, something that will lead to their defences being breached [or at least their computers]. Hence the saying, “Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts“, or in the case of the digital world “Beware ‘Geeks’ Bearing Gifts“.

So, what would happen if someone made a replica wooden ‘Trojan Horse‘, complete with a cargo of Greek soldiers inside it, and tried to get it into secure sites, or even somewhere that should know better, because of history?

Well, someone did just this, and the hilarious results can be seen in the video that can be found here: http://dotfuturemanifesto.blogspot.com/2006/10/move-showing-dangers-of-trojan-horse.html

What does this have to do with what we are seeing now in the malware scene? Well, we have seen a massive move from viruses and worms [back] to Trojan Horses as the preferred way to package malware. Why? Because most malware authors know that the easiest way to bypass the defences is to get the person using the keyboard and mouse to invite their malware in using social engineering techniques, just like the Greeks did to the people of Troy!

Also, my recent paper or ‘rootkits’ covers the situation where lots of Windows malware is now using so-called ‘rootkit’ techniques*, but in most cases these malware are actually using ’stealth’ techniques to hide their presence from the operating system, and ALL applications that run on it, including anti-virus, personal firewalls and anti-spyware tools. Stealth techniques have been in malware since the Brain virus first showed up in 1986, yes two decades ago! Talk about re-inventing the wheel!

So, next time remember that history is useful, it can stop people from repeating the same mistakes over and over again……Well, I can hope, can’t I?

[*] For the pedantic readers out there, you know who you are! Yes, I know there are real rootkits, this is also covered in my paper.

No I haven’t fallen off the edge of the world, been kidnapped by aliens, or been hibernating. I’ve been preparing for the Virus Bulletin 2006 conference which was held last week in Montreal, Canada. Before that I was in France for 4 days at a customer site, I have also been updating a presentation for a guest lecture that I will give tomorrow at the University of Warwick, so, I’ve been busy creating and giving presentations. Oh, and that’s on top of my ‘usual‘ workload.

I will post a review of the conference in a week or so, covering my own personal thoughst on the conference and the content. This will include my thoughts on some of the presentations I attended on both the technical and corporate streams.

So, now the conference is over, I can make the paper I presented available to anyone that wants a copy.

Here’s the abstract that I submitted, and was selected back in March:

“Rootkits have been around almost since the start of computing, however over the last two years the threat has changed; no longer is it just a *NIX [Unix/Linux] problem, corporate and academic computers running Microsoft Windows are now an increasing target. We are now at a tipping point; rootkits are no longer a minor annoyance or threat, they are starting to become a major cause for concern.

Many corporate security staff have a rather vague understanding of rootkits, not just what they are, but how they work. Furthermore many have little understanding of the risks to their company or their own home computer.

This paper will explain what rootkits are and how they work. It will also discuss ways to combat them using methods that range from simple security methodologies through to technical solutions. ”

The full paper [in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF)] can be found here: http://arachnid.homeip.net/papers*

All feedback, comments, flames, suggestions, etc. are most welcome.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as I’ve caught up with the backlog of work I have piling up around me. So, if you see a news article saying: “A computer geek was found today buried under piles of work… he was finally extracted, alive, by teams of rescuers digging him out 48 hours after they were alerted to the disaster…” then you know it was probably me.

[*] All my other conference papers and magazine articles I’ve written can also be found there.