MoMusings

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?