The Glider

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

When teaching Security Essentials (sec401) we often talk about one of the more useful hacking tools in everyone's arsenal, a browser. Wielding a browser in the right manner can expose all kinds of interesting information as is the case with vBulletin version 3.8.6.
vBulletin, used to power online discussion sites has a serious flaw in vB 3.8.6. Browsing to the FAQ page on a vulnerable site and searching for the correct term will disclose the database credentials which can then be used to further compromise the site (http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/512575). It shows that vulnerabilities do not need to be complex. It also shows that code review, testing and of course input validation is essential.
The vendor jumped on the issue quickly and provides a patch on their site. Later versions of the product that are not vulnerable are also available. There do still seem to be sites up running the vulnerable code. If yours is one of those, you may want to patch soon.
MH (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

In addition to stuxnet which has been using the LNK vulnerability to exploit systems since approximately the 14th of this month (possibly longer) a few researchers have been mentioning that they have encountered additional malware utilising the LNK vulnerability. eset has a write up here on what they have found -http://blog.eset.com/2010/07/22/new-malicious-lnks-here-we-go
Until patched expect more.
MH (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Usually when I receive an email that looks like spam, I can just mash my Send to Junk keyboard shortcut and it goes away. But every once in awhile there is a decent looking spam that *might* be real. At first glance it won't have an images or selling viagra, or anything like that in it, and might just look real.
This is where the common sense approach to reading email kicks in. Obviously this post it not for the expert, this is probably more of the occasional user, but maybe someone in between will find it useful.
Here's a spam I received this morning that prompted me to write this diary:
From: Comcast
This is a courtesy reminder that your Comcast Billing Information needs to be verified.
In order to continue using comcast services, click the link below, sign in and and follow the provided steps:


Malicious Link was right here



Regards,

Comcast Billing Department
So, let's look at this and see how easy this is to detect:

I'm not a Comcast customer. So right there, it was easy to detect.
comcast in the second line is not capitalized. A real Comcast email would have capitalized their own companies name.
Usually an email like this (from Comcast corporate) would tend to have all kinds of disclaimers and other nonsense at the bottom of the email.
The link that I removed was not to comcast.com

Now, if we get into the weeds a bit more, we can look at the headers and see where it came from.
It came from a server at a .edu. I don't want to talk about which .edu (but it was in the United States), as I am going to try and get in touch with their security department after I get done writing this Diary.
Even more bad though -- it came from the root account on this server, the headers even indicate what version of Linux this server was running (Ubuntu). Most likely culprit? Probably an SSH scan that compromised the root account.
Make sure you have tight controls over those SSH accounts! And use common sense when reading your email. If it looks like bull, and it smells like bull. Chances are, it's bull.
Hopefully this helped someone.
Oh, the malicious link? Pointed you to a site that collected your usernames and passwords.
-- Joel Esler | http://blog.joelesler.net | http://twitter.com/joelesler
(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Note that this malware does NOT exploit 'Vulnerability in Windows Shell Could Allow Remote Code Execution' 2286198. It simply uses the autorun.inf to launch the executable, or waits for the user to double click the .LNK file. I wrote up this diary before fellow handler Bojan pointed that out to me.
Aaron wrote in the following:

We had a user get infected ... The symptoms we saw were as follows:

The virus hides all folders on the root of any drive it has write access to.
It then drops an LNK file named the same as all of the folders. So you have a series of LNK files where your folders used to be. This appears to only happen at the root of the drive(s) the user has write access to.
Then the virus drops an autorun.inf, EXE, and SRC file at the root of the infected drives.



One of the things we did to scan our server shares was to run robocopy in list-only mode. We used a command similar to this:

robocopy servershare c: *.lnk /MAXAGE:2 /L /S /R:3 /W:3 /NDL

It scans for any LNK files created in the past 2 days. The reasoning is that LNK files should not be created very often on shares, so a large number of them would be suspicious.

He also sent us a copy of the files found on the affected system. The virustotal results virustotal.com results yesterday were 11/36 (30.56%).
This is what the .LNK file looks like:
xxd Backup Drive.lnk

0000000: 4c00 0000 0114 0200 0000 0000 c000 0000 L...............

0000010: 0000 0046 cb00 0000 0700 0000 0000 0000 ...F............

0000020: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 007b b54b .............{.K

0000030: 7627 cb01 00c2 0100 0300 0000 0100 0000 v'..............

0000040: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 7500 1400 ............u...

0000050: 1f50 e04f d020 ea3a 6910 a2d8 0800 2b30 .P.O. .:i.....+0

0000060: 309d 1900 2f43 3a5c 0000 0000 0000 0000 0.../C:........

0000070: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0046 0032 0000 ...........F.2..

0000080: c201 00f3 3c87 9907 0066 6f65 7576 652e ........foeuve.

0000090: 7363 7200 002c 0003 0004 00ef be00 0000 scr..,..........

00000a0: 0000 0000 0014 0000 0066 006f 0065 0075 .........f.o.e.u

00000b0: 0076 0065 002e 0073 0063 0072 0000 001a .v.e...s.c.r....

00000c0: 0000 004a 0000 001c 0000 0002 0000 0000 ...J............

00000d0: 0000 0000 0000 001c 0000 003f 0000 0023 ...........?...#

00000e0: 0000 0003 0000 0014 0000 0020 0000 0000 ........... ....

00000f0: 00fe 7f5c 5c43 6c69 656e 745c 4324 0043 ...ClientC$.C

0000100: 3a00 666f 6575 7665 2e73 6372 000c 002e :.foeuve.scr....

0000110: 005c 0066 006f 0065 0075 0076 0065 002e ..f.o.e.u.v.e..

0000120: 0073 0063 0072 0021 0025 0073 0079 0073 .s.c.r.!.%.s.y.s

0000130: 0074 0065 006d 0072 006f 006f 0074 0025 .t.e.m.r.o.o.t.%

0000140: 005c 0073 0079 0073 0074 0065 006d 0033 ..s.y.s.t.e.m.3

0000150: 0032 005c 0073 0068 0065 006c 006c 0033 .2..s.h.e.l.l.3

0000160: 0032 002e 0064 006c 006c 0000 0000 00 .2...d.l.l.....
Here are md5sums of the files captured:
4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa 994e7f70c6c8cfdc0d10.lnk

eb72f852dc417e5c1c500d777b763ff5 autorun.inf

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa Backup Drive.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa dellinks.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa DELL.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa Documents and Settings.lnk

7a86fc2e33f1853e56e87968554a4f23 Documents.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa DOS.lnk

6c312fa82a83602bf4bac49c569dddba foeuve.exe

6c312fa82a83602bf4bac49c569dddba foeuve.scr

8dd2dbd509c9e30c9a481fb790521a2a Music.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa New Folder.lnk

62ed86349f7d418d67c0e4dbbf2b0b57 Pictures.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa Program Files.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa QUARANTINE.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa RECYCLER.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa Root_C.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa System Volume Information.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa temp.lnk

94ea35e7315ede1f3226b42e8a1197e9 Video.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa Vision5.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa VNCTEMP.lnk

4514e6b0ebf1859bc06464cc86e6b0aa WINDOWS.lnk
The .LNK files affected all have the same hash value, the two dropped files as well (foeuve.*) share md5sums. Here is the contents of autorun.inf:
cat autorun.inf

[AUtoRUn]

aCTION=Open folder to view files

SHeLLEXECuTe=FOeUVE.EXE

IcoN=%syStEMRoOt%sySTEm32Shell32.dll,4
Today the virustotal.com results for foeuvre.scr are similar, 23/41 (56.1%).
Thanks Aaron!
So, in a nutshell, not the exploit or malware we were looking for, but interesting nonetheless.
Cheers,

Adrien de Beaupr

EWA-Canada.com
(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

A Dell support forum post confirms that PowerEdge R410 replacement motherboards contain malware. The posting is here en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/956/t/19339458.aspx. The embedded server management firmware in some motherboards contain the malicious code. The issue is not present on new servers and does not impact non-Windows based servers. No further information on the malware itself, mitigation techniques, the specific motherboards affected, nor the method of the original infection are yet available. Dell is sending snail mail and calling affected customers. Thanks Geoff and one other reader for bringing this to our attention!
Cheers,

Adrien de Beaupr

EWA-Canada.com (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Adobe have announced that Reader will run in a sandbox called Protected Mode blogs.adobe.com/asset/2010/07/%20introducing-adobe-reader-protected-mode.html. It is based on Microsoft's Practical Windows Sandboxing blogs.msdn.com/b/david_leblanc/archive/2007/07.aspx. This is good news as it will drastically reduce the attack surface of Adobe Reader and mitigate the impact of any vulnerabilities within the product.
Cheers,

Adrien de Beaupr

EWA-Canada.com (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.