Daily Archives: November 11, 2011

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Feds charge 7 in Internet ad-fraud case

NEW YORK (AP) — A crew of Internet bandits devised an international scheme to hijack more than 4 million computers worldwide, manipulating traffic on Netflix, the Internal Revenue Service and other popular websites to generate at least $14 million in fraudulent advertising revenue, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

 

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About 500,000 computers in the United States were infected withmalware, including those used by ordinary users, educational institutions, nonprofits and government agencies like NASA, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a Manhattan news conference.
Bharara called the case “the first of its kind” because the suspects set up their own “rogue servers” to secretly reroute Internet traffic to sites where they had a cut of the advertising revenue.

Six of the seven people named in the indictment were Estonians who were in custody in that country, and extradition was being sought, prosecutors said; one Russian remained at large. As part of the takedown, the FBI disabled the rogue servers without interrupting Internet service, authorities said.

The problem was first discovered at NASA, where 130 computers were infected. Investigators followed a digital trail to Eastern Europe, where the defendants operated “companies that masqueraded as legitimate participants in the Internet advertising industry,” according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday.

The defendants “engaged in a massive and sophisticated scheme that infected at least 4 million computers located in over 100 countries with malicious software or malware,” the indictment said. “Without the computer users’ knowledge or permission, the malware digitally hijacked the infected computers to facilitate the fraud.”

Once their computers were infected, people seeking to visit Netflix, the IRS, ESPN, Amazon and other legitimate sites were redirected to sites where the defendants collected income for each click on an ad, authorities said. The malware and corrupted servers also allowed the defendants to substitute legitimate ads on other websites with replacement ads that earned them more illicit income, they added.

“On a massive scale, the defendants gave new meaning to the term ‘false advertising,'” Bharara said.
The indictment estimated the defendants “reaped least $14 million in ill-gotten gains” over a five-year period.

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Microsoft patches critical Windows 7 bug, downplays exploit threat

Microsoft today delivered four security updates that patched four vulnerabilities in Windows, most of them affecting the newer editions of Vista and Windows 7.

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Only one of the updates was marked “critical,” Microsoft’s most-serious threat ranking. Two of the remaining were labeled “important” and the fourth was tagged as “moderate.”

As expected, Microsoft did not patch the Windows kernel vulnerability exploited by the Duqu campaign.

Top on Microsoft’s chart today — and on outside researchers’ to-do lists as well — was the MS10-083 update that patches a bug in Windows Vista’s, Windows 7’s and Server 2008’s TCP/IP stack, which regulates Internet connections.

The vulnerability could be used by attackers in certain circumstances to hijack an unpatched PC, said Microsoft, which nevertheless downplayed the likelihood of successful attacks.

“This critical bug allows an attack via the network, and looks troublesome at first glance,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security. “But it doesn’t look very easy to pull off, so in this case, it’s not as big a concern as one would think.”

Storms pointed to a post by Microsoft engineers on the Security Research & Defense blog that spelled out the necessary conditions for an effective attack.

“We believe it is difficult to achieve [remote code execution] using this vulnerability considering that the type of network packets required are normally filtered at the perimeter and the small timing window … and [that] a large number of packets are required to pull off the attack,” wrote Ali Rahbar and Mark Wodrich of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).

Microsoft gave the vulnerability an exploitability index rating of “2,” meaning that it expects only unreliable exploit code to appear in the next 30 days.

Even so, some researchers warned that if criminals focused their attention on the bug, they may be able to craft a consistent exploit that could be used to launch worm-based attacks.

Microsoft also updated Windows Mail and Windows Meeting Space on Vista, Windows 7 and Server 2008 to fix yet another “DLL load hijacking” vulnerability.

DLL load hijacking, sometimes called “binary pre-loading,” describes a class of bugs first revealed in August 2010. Microsoft has been patching its software to fix the problem — which can be exploited by tricking an application into loading a malicious file with the same name as a required dynamic link library, or DLL — since last November.

Today’s MS11-085 update was the eighteenth Microsoft has issued to fix DLL load-hijacking vulnerabilities in its software.

“They’re a dime-a-dozen these days,” said Storms of the latest in the long-running series.

Researchers also noted that while Microsoft did not patch the Duqu-exploited bug, it did fix a different flaw in the TrueType font parsing engine, the component targeted by the Trojan’s attacks.

MS11-084 fixes a single vulnerability in the Windows kernel-mode driver “Win32k.sys” that can be exploited through a malformed TrueType font file.

“We’re see a pattern of kernel-level bugs and parsing of font files,” said Storms. “And they’re going to have to come back and patch this again for Duqu.”

Microsoft patched the TrueType engine within Win32k.sys just last month, fixing a flaw that let hackers conduct denial-of-service attacks to cripple Windows PCs. Today’s bug was also categorized as a denial-of-service flaw.

In lieu of a fix, Microsoft last week told customers that they could defend their systems by blocking access to “t2embed.dll,” the dynamic link library that handles embedded TrueType fonts.

An advisory offered command-prompt strings IT administrators can use to deny access to t2embed.dll, and links to one of Microsoft’s “Fix-it” tools that automate the process of blocking or unblocking access to the library.

Blocking t2embed.dll, however, has side effects: Applications, including Web browsers, applications in Microsoft’s Office suite and Adobe’s Reader, may not render text properly.

Microsoft also updated that advisory today with a link to a list of its antivirus partners that have issued signatures to detect the kernel-based Duqu attacks.

November’s security patches can be downloaded and installed via the Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, as well as through Windows Server Update Services.