The Mai/June 2020 issue of our SWITCH Security Report is available!

Dear Reader!

A new issue of our bi-monthly SWITCH Security Report is available!

The topics covered in this report are:

The coronavirus: a blessing for some, a curse for others – where is IT security at with contactless payment?
You’ve got mail (and malware too) – serious security gap in Apple’s Mail app on iPads and iPhones now closed
Everything must go – ‘Shade’ hackers ‘shut down’ and publish hundreds of thousands of decryption keys
Swiss users targeted by cybercriminals
Elite targets – ETH supercomputers Euler and Leonhard (and more) hacked

The Security Report is available in both English and German.

»» Download the English report. »» Download the German report.

The March/April 2019 issue of our SWITCH Security Report is available!

Dear Reader!

A new issue of our bi-monthly SWITCH Security Report is available!

The topics covered in this report are:

Lenin and the detectives: Mobiispy stalkerware can make highly personal data collected while monitoring children and partners publicly accessible
Ransomware trojan LockerGoga brings companies to their knees
Straight talk at Facebook: when tech giants fail to meet even minimal security requirements
Malware straight from the factory: when Shadow Hammer strikes the supply chain

The Security Report is available in both English and German.

»» Download the English report. »» Download the German report.

Did you miss our previous Security Report? Click here to go to the archive.

Rogue Mobile App

Rogue mobile apps are counterfeit apps designed to mimic trusted brands or apps with non-advertised malicious features. In both cases, the goal is that unaware users install the app in order to steal sensitive information such as credit card data or login credentials.

The common way to install apps is to use the official app store. By default, neither Android nor Apple’s iPhone allow users to install apps from unknown sources. However, this does not mean we can just trust the official app store. SWITCH-CERT has been monitoring Apple’s App Store and Google Play for some time and noticed that many rogue apps are able to sneak into Google Play especially.

Google Play

Attackers are abusing the weak app testing procedure of Google to sneak their rogue apps into Google Play. One can find counterfeit apps of Swiss brands on a regular basis. Typically, the apps reside on Google Play for some time until it is removed because of take down requests from security researchers. Until that happens, unaware users are likely to install such apps and put their data at risk.

The screenshot below shows apps found when searching for Bluewin. During the last months, Bluewin has been a common target for rogue counterfeit apps. The red circle indicates the rogue app.

Play Store result for the search key word “Bluewin”

Continue reading “Rogue Mobile App”

Money for Nothing and Coins for Free

written by Antoine Neuenschwander

Beginning in mid-September 2017, we started seeing a new abuse scheme on .ch and .li domains. The websites in question were running on outdated software and inevitably, hackers exploited some well-known vulnerability in order to inject malicious code. At this point we would usually expect an exploit kit in the website’s content with the purpose of infecting the victim’s machine with malware. In these cases however, the Javascript inject often looked somewhat like the following:

This code is designed to run in the background of the victim’s browser and immediately starts an endless loop of intensive computations at full pace, effectively turning the browser into a hash-crunching mule for the sake of distributed mining of cryptocoins, with profits going directly to the hacker.

Continue reading “Money for Nothing and Coins for Free”

94 .ch & .li domain names hijacked and used for drive-by

A Swiss domain holder called us today telling us that the .ch zone points to the wrong name servers for his domain.

The NS entries were ns1.dnshost[.]ga and ns2.dnshost[.]ga. We contacted the registrar and soon realized that this is not the only domain that had unauthorized changes. We identified 93 additional .ch and .li domain names that pointed to the two rogue name servers. While domain hijacking by pointing to a rogue NS is a known attack, 94 domains on a single day is very unusual. So we analyzed what the hijacked domains were used for and soon found out that they are used to infect internet users with malware.

Visitors to the hijacked domains were redirected to the Keitaro TDS (traffic distribution system):

hXXp://46.183.219[.]227/VWcjj6

A TDS decides where to redirect the visitor to, often depending on its IP address (i.e. country),
user agent and operating system.

A dead end may look like the following:

hXXp//46.183.219[.]227/favicon.ico
hXXp://46.183.219[.]227/www.bingo.com

And the visitor will be redirected to Google.

However, in some cases, the visitor is redirected to the Rig Exploit Kit:

hXXp://188.225.87[.]223/?doctor&news=...&;money=...&cars=236&medicine=3848
hXXp://188.225.87[.]223/?health&news=...
...

And the visitor gets infected.

The payload is Neutrino Bot:

MD5: a32f3d0a71a16a461ad94c5bee695988
SHA256: 492081097c78d784be3996d3b823a660f52e0632410ffb2a2a225bd1ec60973d).

It gets in touch with its command and control server and grabs additional modules:

hXXp://poer23[.]tk/tasks.php
hXXp://poer23[.]tk/modules/nn_grabber_x32.dll
hXXp://poer23[.]tk/modules/nn_grabber_x64.dll

A little later, it also gets an update

hXXp//www.araop[.]tk/test.exe

MD5: 7c2864ce7aa0fff3f53fa191c2e63b59
SHA256: c1d60c9fff65bbd0e3156a249ad91873f1719986945f50759b3479a258969b38)

Status

The rogue NS were inserted in the .ch zone file at around 13:00 today. The registrar discovered soon what happened and rolled back the unauthorized changes. At 16:00 all of the changes in the .ch & .li zone were reverted and the NS records pointed to the legitimate name servers again.

[Update 10.7.17 17:15]

Gandi the registrar of the 94 domain names has written a blog post, as well as SCRT the domain holder that initially informed us about the domain name hijacking of scrt.ch. SCRT also showed how Strict Transport Security protected their recurring visitors from being redirected to the bogus website!

Why the most successful Retefe spam campaign never paid off

Switzerland is one of the main targets of the Retefe banking trojan since its first appearance in November 2013. At that time, it changed the local DNS resolver on the computer (See also blog post “Retefe Bankentrojaner” in German only). Almost a year went by until they changed to the still current approach of setting a proxy auto-config (PAC) URL (See also blog post “The Retefe banking Trojan has targeted Switzerland“). To understand the story of this blog post, it helps to understand the modus operandi of the Retefe malware. We recommend you read up on it on our blog links posted above if you are not familiar with it.

While the Retefe actors are constantly changing tactics, for example their newest campaigns also target Mac OS X users, their malware still works the same. One of notable changes was the introduction of Tor in 2016. At first, they started using Tor gateway domain names such as onion.to, onion.link within the proxy auto-config URLs, later on they switched to Tor completely. The advantage of using Tor is of course, anonymity and the difficulty to block or take down the infrastructure.

Onion domain names don’t use DNS or do they?
The Tor network can use .onion domain names but these names are not resolved over DNS but instead work only in the Tor network. RFC 7686 (The “.onion” Special-Use Domain Name) goes into more details on the special case of .onion domain names. However, the fact is that .onion domain names do leak into the DNS system. For potential reasons and more information on this subject we recommend the paper by Versign Labs “Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root” (PDF).
Continue reading “Why the most successful Retefe spam campaign never paid off”

Adups — The Spy in your Pocket

written by Antoine Neuenschwander

Smartphones have become inseparable companions of our everyday life. They are so cheap nowadays, you can buy commodity devices running Android OS for less than a hundred Swiss francs. Smartphones aren’t mere wireless telephony devices. They are modern computer systems equipped with a variety of sensors: cameras, microphone, GPS receiver, gyroscopes and accelerometers, etc. They also feature multiple wireless communication interfaces such as multi-generation mobile networking, 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc, which make them a polyvalent communication platform with a quasi permanent Internet connection. Another way of looking at it: using all the components typical smartphones are equipped with, they can be fitted as perfect bugging devices.

On November 15th 2016, Kryptowire published a blog post revealing that „several models of Android mobile devices contained a firmware that collected sensitive personal data about their users and transmitted the data to third-party servers without disclosure or the users’ consent“. The sensitive data includes unique device and user identifiers, but also contact lists, call history, installed applications, and under circumstances text messages as well as fine grained location data. The said firmware originates from Adups, a Shanghai-based company specialized in mobile and IoT technologies. It is part of their FOTA product, a commercial replacement of Google’s Over-The-Air upgrade system, which is used to deploy firmware upgrades to the devices (hence the acronym: Firmware Over The Air). The FOTA component is pre-installed on various brands and models of Android devices manufactured in China. Being installed as a system APK, the software has unrestricted access to all data on the device and cannot be uninstalled.

HTTP request originating from a device affected by the Adups backdoor

Continue reading “Adups — The Spy in your Pocket”

Usage of .ch domain names for spamming malware Tofsee stopped

It is rare that a malware family uses .ch or .li domain names in their domain name generation algorithm (DGA). The last time I remember, that we had to take action against a malware using .ch or .li domain names was about 8 years ago. It was Conficker that infected millions of computers worldwide. The malware was generating about 500 .ch and .li domains a day to be potentially used as a command and control server. By then SWITCH joined the conficker working group to prevent the use of domain names by this malware.

Since then we have been watching the use of .ch and .li domain names in malware DGAs and prepared for this by making an agreement with the Registrar of Last Resort (RoLR) to prevent the registration of domain names used in DGA algorithms of malware.

This week the Swiss Govermental Computer Emergency Response Team (GovCERT) informed us about the malware Tofsee using .ch as one of the TLDs in its DGA. Continue reading “Usage of .ch domain names for spamming malware Tofsee stopped”

A file that wasn’t there

One of our minions (he was introduced in this blog entry a while ago) recently came to us asking for advice: he was about to automate yet another task, by using his Python-fu, and realized that he misses entries in the file system as well as in the registry.

Notably, he only sees this behaviour on 64bit-versions of the Windows operating system:

Windows Explorer (64bit) vs Python application (32bit) — Left: Windows Explorer (64bit) lists several folders and files. Right: Python application (32bit) only lists the folder Microsoft.

The left image shows the folder C:\Windows\System32\Tasks as seen in the Windows Explorer, the right image as seen in a simple 32bit-python application. Only the subfolder Microsoft is listed there. Something is amiss.

Below is the code to produce the right image, when executed in a 32bit-version of Python:

import glob, os
for pathfilename in glob.glob(r"C:\Windows\System32\Tasks\*"):
    print pathfilename

Continue reading “A file that wasn’t there”

An attachment that wasn’t there

By Slavo Greminger and Oli Schacher

On a daily basis we collect tons of Spam emails, which we analyze for malicious content. Of course, this is not done manually by our thousands of minions, but automated using some Python-fu. Python is a programming language that comes with many libraries, making it easy for us to quickly perform such tasks.

Python’s email library deals with, well, emails. And it does it well. But on October 3rd, we encountered an attachment that wasn’t there – at least according to Python’s email library.

Mal-formatted email — Left: Outlook Web does not show the attachment Right: Thunderbird does show the attachment

Now how could that happen?

Emails do have a certain structure, which is described nicely in RFC #822, RFC #2822, RFC #5322, RFC #2045, RFC #2046, RFC #2047, RFC #2049, RFC #2231, RFC #4288 and RFC #4289. Even though these RFC’s are clear in their own way, an illustration might help (we focus on multipart emails only) to understand why Python’s email library got fooled.

Continue reading “An attachment that wasn’t there”

New SWITCH Security Report available

Dear Reader!

A new issue of our monthly SWITCH Security Report has just been released.

The topics covered in this report are

ICSI’s Haystack looking for Android needles – and beta testers for its field study
Staging a comeback with a blackout – macro-Trojans return and apparently cause Christmas power cut in western Ukraine
Is it really smart? Many smart home solutions have security holes as big as a garage door
From Mad Men to Bad Boys – malware becoming harder to monitor due to malvertising

The Security Report is available in both English and German.

»» Download the english report. »» Download the german report.

Attack of the killer Ads

By Daniel Stirnimann and Serge Droz

Recently I was quoted saying “… .ch and .li are the most secure (top-level) domains!”. In the same meeting, Security Rock Star Mikko Hyppönen claimed, “Surfing the Web with your laptop is the most dangerous thing you can do in the Internet.” So what is true, what is false? Rather than speculate about obscure statistics I’d like to illustrate one of the big problems we face in .ch today, namely using ads as a back door to reach victims through reputable sites.

Ads: enter through the hallway

Malware distributors have one goal: spreading their stuff as widely as possible. This is achieved through different means. Malware was traditionally distributed – and still is – through e-mail attachments. This was the case, for example, with the Retefe malware. Alternatively, web pages can be hacked and used to spread malware by exploiting browser bugs. SWITCH has been very active, through its Safer Internet initiative, in working to reduce this infection vector. In fact, we’ve been so successful, that drive-by is very scarce in Switzerland, hence the statement that ” … .ch is one of the most secure ccTLDs”. Drive-by websites are always hacked, but in most cases they are not very popular websites, since popular websites are typically well protected. Many of the later ones offer a backdoor tough: ads! News sites in particular make most of their revenue by selling on line ads, which explains the “ad-war” arms race between ad-blockers an news agencies (see our Security Report on anti-anti-ad features). A very common way is malvertising, a term coined by William Salusky. Salusky found ads that were in fact carrying malicious payloads. Let’s look at a slightly different scenario, namely a legitimate but compromised ad server. While technically a different scenario it has the same effect on the end user.

Most people would think that visiting a website just serves you content from that site but this is not true for most of the large sites, in particular news sites. They import contents such as videos, trackers, counters, scripts and especially ads from third-party sites. These are not controlled by the original site, and often import content themselves from yet another site. Thus, a well maintained site with high security standards will often import stuff from sites with lower security. Think of it as sitting in a highly rated restaurant that has one bad food supplier.

The image below shows all the external sites involved whenever you visit three popular news sites.

Ohne Addon — The above example shows what happens when you visit three popular Swiss newspapers. Triangles denote third-party sites from which content is imported when you visit the respective news site. The visualisation was done using the Mozilla addon LightBeam

Continue reading “Attack of the killer Ads”

Fixing hundreds of websites in one day

Remedying Angler infections in Switzerland

Author: Serge Droz

In recent weeks the Angler exploit kit has become the dominating tool for DriveBy attacks. Cleaning Angler compromised web servers is a challenge which has been well mastered in Switzerland, thanks to the close collaboration of Swiss hosters and SWITCH.

The culprit

On Sunday July 5 an the Italian ‘offensive security’ firm HACKING TEAM got hacked and all its files were made public. This included a couple of zero day exploits. Only two days later one of these was already used in the wild by the notorious Angler exploit kit. This is not surprising: Angler today is the most sophisticated exploit kit. Since its inception in 2013 it sported several new innovations which are today uses by others. According to a Sophos blog Angler’s “market share” rose from about 22% last fall to more than 80% this spring.

The payload

Angler used to distribute a variety of different malwares, from ransom-ware to banking trojans. However it seems with the rapid growth of the kit it also focused on distributing mostly Cryptowall 3.0. This malware encrypts all the files on an infected system and demands a hefty ransom of several hundreds of Euros to unlock them. Many people claim to not have “anything important” on their PCs to then discover that all their family pictures of the past ten years are gone. An it’s not looking better for businesses that lose all their data, including their backups on USB disks.

Cleaning Infections in Switzerland

SWITCH has been cleaning up misused domains since several years now through its Safer Internet campaign. We have processed thousands of domains and thus protected visitors of Swiss websites from the evil of exploit kits, such as Angler. Infection rates of Swiss websites have indeed gone down over the past month, or so we believed. On the 22. July 2015 however, the good folks from the National Cyber Security Centre Finland (NCSC-FI) and abuse.ch have managed to make a small dent into Angles infrastructure. A total of over 200’000 compromised URLs worldwide were reported that are misused by Angular.

Angler Distribution — Distribution of web servers, which are misused by the Angler exploit-kit.

Of these 166 where in the .ch and .li top level domain and thus could be entered into our program. We reported these URLs to the respective domain owners as well as the hoster we have contacts to. Checking on the 23. July over 90% of these domains have been cleaned up and a handful have been added. As of the 24. July 2015 only a few sites remain infected.

This means that Swiss hosters are doing an excellent job. Cleaning a web page is not simple. It’s not enough to just remove the the offending code from that page itself. It’s known that the Angler crew installs several back doors, all of which have to be found and removed. These back doors often are webshells, which give full control over the entire web space of the server. The respective php files are obfuscated and not easily recognizable.

The Webshell used by the Angler crew. The white box shows the obfuscated php code. The shell gives full access to all resources the webserver has access to.

Some of the hoster report information back to us for which we are very grateful. This information can then be used to make the analysis better and discover new attack patterns quickly.

Conclusion

The close collaboration and exchange of information between all the stakeholders allows for a very rapid reaction to threats. Cleaning these web pages needs substantial resources by the hosters and also SWITCH. But it’s well invested: Taking down these pages quickly protects visitors from being infected by Cryptowall and saves their valuable data, be this treasured personal files or critical business information.

Safer Internet

Anna is the director of a small kindergarten in Zurich. To give the kindergarten a home on the Internet, she registered a domain name and put up a website where parents can get up-to-date information about the kindergarten. A friend helped her to install a popular open-source content management system (CMS) for the website, so that she can change the menu every week and perform other updates herself. The parents of the kids were delighted to have access to this information online.

Three months after the website went online, one of the parents called her, telling her that the website was no longer available, and a warning was displayed instead. He also told her that he had a virus on his home PC and had to reinstall his operating system and change all his Internet passwords. When she talked to other parents that day, they told her the same.

What happened? Continue reading “Safer Internet”