Cyber Security Institute

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Hackers now offer subscription services, support for their malware

A list of options at top of the home page allows visitors to transact business in Russian or in English, offers an FAQ section, spells out the terms and conditions for software use and provides details on payment forms that are supported.  The site offers malicious code that webmasters with criminal intent can use to infect visitors to their sites with a spyware Trojan horse.  In return for downloading the malware to their sites, Web site owners are promised at least ¬50—about $66 (U.S.)—every Monday, with the potential for even more for “clean installs” of the malicious code on end user systems.  As organized gangs increasingly turn to cybercrime, sites like the one described are coming to represent the new face of malware development and distribution, according to security researchers.  Unlike malicious code writers of the past who tended to distribute their code to a tight group of insiders or in underground newsgroups, the new breed is far more professional about how it hawks, plies and prices its wares, they said.  “We’ve been seeing a growth of highly organized managed exploit providers in non-extradition countries” over the past year or so, said Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategies at IBM’s Internet Security Systems X-Force team.  For subscriptions starting as low as $20 per month, such enterprises sell “fully managed exploit engines” that spyware distributors and spammers can use to infiltrate systems worldwide, he said.

And many exploit providers simply wait for Microsoft Corp.‘s monthly patches, which they then reverse-engineer to develop new exploit code against the disclosed vulnerabilities, Ollmann said.

While investigating a Trojan horse named Gozi recently, Jackson discovered that it was designed to steal data from encrypted Secure Sockets Layer streams and send it to a server in St. Petersburg, Russia.  A customer query returning three passwords for a small retailer might cost 100 WMZ, while a query for 10 passwords for an international bank might fetch 2,500 WMZ or more.  Customers could also choose how they wanted their search results delivered—as compressed files in e-mails or via FTP.  In addition to the original Trojan horse, the server also hosted two ready-to-deploy variants in a separate staging area.

Often, groups such as the HangUp Team also offer a detection monitoring service with which they keep an eye on antivirus vendors to know exactly when signatures are available that can detect their malware.

The actual server hardware that the 76Service used was being managed by another entity called Russian Business Network (RBN), which provided Simple Network Management Protocol-based management and back-up services.

“We are not talking about kids doing it for kicks over the weekend anymore,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan Inc., a San Jose-based security vendor.  That report said that cybercriminals hold “vulnerability auctions” in which they sell information on freshly discovered software flaws to the highest bidder.

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