Industry Intel

We continue to spot new cybercrime ecosystem propositions for spam-ready, cybercrime-friendly SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) targeting QA (Quality Assurance) aware cybercriminals looking to gain access to dedicated mail servers with clean IP reputation, ensuring that their campaigns will reach the recipient’s Inbox. Relying on ‘in-house’ built infrastructure or direct outsourcing to bulletproof hosting providers, these services continue empowering prospective customers with managed, popular spam software compatible services, potentially exposing millions of users to fraudulent or malicious email campaigns.

Let’s discuss yet another managed service offering spam-ready SMTP servers, and connect it to malicious campaigns that have directly interacted with the same infrastructure it’s currently hosted on, indicating that it’s already “in business”.

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Thanks to the free, commercial availability of mass Web site hacking tools, in combination with hundreds of thousands of misconfigured and unpatched Web sites, blogs and forums currently susceptible to exploitation, cybercriminals are successfully monetizing the compromise process. They are setting up iFrame based traffic E-shops and offering access to hijacked legitimate traffic to be later on converted to malware-infected hosts.

Despite the fact that the iFrame traffic E-shop that I’ll discuss in this post is pitching itself as a “legitimate traffic service”, it’s also explicitly emphasizing on the fact that iFrame based traffic is perfectly suitable to be used for Web malware exploitation kits. Let’s take a closer look at the actual (international) underground market ad, and discuss the relevance of these E-shops in today’s modern cybercrime ecosystem.

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Standardization is the cybercrime ecosystem’s efficiency-oriented mentality to the general business ‘threat’ posed by inefficiencies and lack of near real-time capitalization on (fraudulent/malicious) business opportunities. Ever since the first (public) discovery of managed spam appliances back in 2007, it has become evident that cybercriminals are no strangers to basic market penetration/market growth/market development business concepts. Whether it’s the template-ization of malware-serving sites, money mule recruitment, spamming or blackhat SEO, this efficiency-oriented mentality can be observed in virtually each and every market segment of the ecosystem.

In this post, I’ll discuss a recent example of standardization, in particular, a blackhat SEO friendly VPS (Virtual Private Server) that comes with over a dozen multi-blackhat-seo-friendly product licenses from third-party products integrated. It empowers potential customers new to this unethical and potentially fraudulent/malicious practice with everything they need to hijack legitimate traffic from major search engines internationally.

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DDoS for hire has always been an inseparable part of the portfolio of services offered by the cybercrime ecosystem. With DDoS extortion continuing to go largely under-reported, throughout the last couple of years — mainly due to the inefficiencies in the business model — the practice also matured into a ‘value-added’ service offered to cybercriminals who’d do their best to distract the attention of a financial institution they’re about to (virtually) rob.

Operating online — under both private and public form — since 2008, the DDoS for hire service that I’ll discuss in the this post is not just offering DDoS attack and Anti-DDoS protection capabilities to potential customers, but also, is ‘vertically integrating’ within the ecosystem by starting to offer TDoS (Telephony Denial of Service Attack) services to prospective customers.

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A circulating malicious spam campaign attempts to trick T-Mobile customers into thinking that they’ve received a password-protected MMS. However, once gullible and socially engineered users execute the malicious attachment, they automatically compromise the confidentiality and integrity of their PCs, allowing the cybercriminals behind the campaign to gain complete control of their PCs.

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In this edition of the Webroot ThreatVlog, Grayson Milbourne talks about the rise of digital phisihing schemes on the internet and how they affect the victims. He then unveils a brand new product from Webroot that is designed to keep users protected from websites that are malicious in nature that could be trying to capture credit card and other personal information.

http://youtu.be/ERyqo1Ljlno

The emergence and sophistication of DIY botnet generating tools has lowered the entry barriers into the world of cybercrime. With ever-increasing professionalism and QA (Quality Assurance) applied by cybercriminals, in combination with  bulletproof cybercrime-friendly hosting providers, these tactics represent key success factors for an increased life cycle of any given fraudulent/malicious campaign. Throughout the years, we’ve witnessed the adoption of multiple bulletproof hosting infrastructure techniques for increasing the life cycle of campaigns,with a clear trend towards diversification, rotation or C&C communication techniques, and most importantly, the clear presence of a KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) type of pragmatic mentality; especially in terms of utilizing HTTP based C&C communication channels for botnet operation.

In this post, I’ll discuss a managed botnet setup as a service, targeting novice cybercriminals who are looking for remote assistance in the process of setting up the C&C infrastructure for their most recently purchased DIY botnet generation tool. I’ll also discuss the relevance of these services in the content of the (sophisticated) competition, that’s been in business for years, possessing the necessary know-how to keep a customer’s fraudulent/malicious campaign up and running.

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The perceived decline in the use of blackhat SEO (search engine optimization) tactics for delivering malicious/fraudulent content over the last couple of years, does not necessarily mean that cybercriminals have somehow abandoned the concept of abusing the world’s most popular search engines. The fact is, this tactic remains effective at reaching users who, on the majority of occasions, trust that that the search result links are malware/exploit free. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Cybercriminals continue introducing new tactics helping fraudulent adversaries to quickly build up and aggregate millions of legitimate visitors, to be later on exposed to online scams or directly converted to malware-infected hosts. This is achieved through cybercrime-friendly underground market traffic exchange networks offering positive ROI (Return on Investment) in the process.

In this post, I’ll take a peek inside a blackhat SEO/cybercrime-friendly doorways management script, discuss its core features, and the ways cybercriminals are currently abusing its ability to populate major search engines with hundreds of millions of search queries relevant bogus Web pages, most commonly hosted on compromised Web servers in an attempt by the cybercriminals behind the campaign to take advantage of the compromised Web site’s high page rank.

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As we anticipated in our series of blog posts highlighting the growing use of DIY/subscription based stealth Bitcoin miners, cybercriminals continue populating this newly emerged market segment, with new, undetected, cryptor-friendly stealth Bitcoin mining tools. This is being done to empower fellow cybercriminals with the necessary tools to help them monetize the malware-infected hosts that they either already have access to, or intend to purchase through one of the, ubiquitous for the cybercrime ecosystem, malware-infected hosts as a service type of underground market propositions.

In post, I’ll discuss the existence of yet another DIY stealth Bitcoin mining tool, in particular how the cybercriminal behind it is attempting to strike a balance between pitching it to fellow cybercriminals — through Terms of Service — in a way that supposedly makes it illegal to install it on PCs without the knowledge of their owners.

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With low-waged employees of unethical ‘data entry’ companies having already set the foundations for an efficient and systematic abuse of all the major Web properties, it shouldn’t be surprising that new market segments quickly emerged to capitalize on the business opportunities offered by the (commercialized) demise of CAPTCHA as an additional human/bot differentiation technique. One of these market segments is supplying automatic (email) account registration services to potential cybercriminals while on their way to either abuse them as WHOIS contact point for their malicious/fraudulent domains, or to directly embed automatically registered accounting data into their Web-based account spamming tools. This takes advantage of the clean IP reputation/white listed nature of these legitimate free email providers.

In this post, I’ll discuss a commercially available (since 2008) DIY (do it yourself) automatic email account registration tool capable of not just modifying the forwarding feature on some of the email providers it’s targeting, but randomizes the accounting data as well. The tool relies on built-in support for a CAPTCHA-solving API-enabled service, and can also activate POP3 and SMTP on some of these accounts thus making it easier for cybercriminals to start abusing them.

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In a series of blog posts, we’ve highlighted the ongoing commoditization of hacked/compromised/stolen account data (user names and passwords), the direct result of today’s efficiency-oriented cybercrime ecosystem, the increasing availability of sophisticated commercial/leaked DIY undetectable malware generating tools, malware-infected hosts as a service, log files on demand services, as well as basic data mining concepts applied on behalf of the operator of a particular botnet. What are cybercriminals up to these days in terms of obtaining such type of data? Monetization through penetration pricing on their way to achieve stolen asset liquidity, so hosts can be sold before its owner becomes aware of the compromise, thereby diminishing its value to zero.

A newly launched E-shop is currently offering access to hundreds of thousands of compromised legitimate Mail.ru, Yahoo, Instagram, PayPal, Twitter, Livejournal, Origin, Skype, Steam, Facebook, and WordPress accounts, as well as 98,000 accounts at corporate SMTP servers, potentially setting up the foundation for successful spear-phishing campaigns.

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Throughout the years, cybercriminals have been perfecting the process of automatically abusing Web application vulnerabilities to achieve their fraudulent and malicious objectives. From the utilization of botnets and search engines to perform active reconnaissance, the general availability of DIY mass SQL injecting tools as well as proprietary malicious script injecting exploitation platforms, the results have been evident ever since in the form of tens of thousands of affected Web sites on a daily basis.

We’ve recently spotted a publicly released, early stage Python source code for a Bing based SQL injection scanner based on Bing “dorks”. What’s the potential of this tool to cause any widespread damage? Let’s find out.

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