Threat Lab

The list of monetization tactics a cybercriminal can take advantage of, once they manage to hijack a huge portion of Web traffic, is virtually limitless and is entirely based on his experience within the cybercrime ecosystem.

Through the utilization of blackhat SEO (search engine optimization), RFI (Remote File Inclusion), DNS cache poisoning, or direct impersonation of popular brands in spam/phishing campaigns tactics, on a daily basis, traffic is sold and resold for achieving a customer’s or a seller’s fraudulent/malicious objectives, and is then most commonly converted to malware-infected hosts.

In this post, I’ll profile two cybercrime-friendly iFrame traffic exchanges, with the second ‘vertically integrating’ by also offering spamming services, as well as services violating YouTube’s ToS (Terms of Service) such as likes, comments, views, favorites and subscribers on demand, with an emphasis on the most common ways through which a potential cybercriminal can abuse any such traffic exchange network.

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We continue to observe an increase in underground market propositions for spam-ready bulletproof SMTP servers, with the cybercriminals behind them trying to differentiate their unique value proposition (UVP) in an attempt to attract more customers.

Let’s profile the underground market propositions of what appears to be a novice cybercriminal offering such spam-ready SMTP servers and discuss their potential, as well as the re-emergence of bulletproof SMTP servers as a propagation method of choice.

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Redirectors are a popular tactic used by cybercriminal on their way to trick Web filtering solutions. And just as we’ve seen in virtually ever segment of the underground marketplace, demand always meets supply.

A newly launched, DIY ‘redirectors’ generating service, aims to make it easier for cybercriminals to hide the true intentions of their campaign through the use of ‘bulletproof redirector domains’. Let’s take a peek inside the cybercriminal’s interface, list all the currently active redirectors, as well as the actual pseudo-randomly generated redirection URLs.

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By Dancho Danchev

Operating in the open since 2009, a bulletproof hosting provider continues offering services for white, grey, and black projects, as they like to describe them, and has been directly contributing to the epidemic growth of cybercrime to the present day through its cybercriminal-friendly services.

From Traffic Distribution Systems (TDS), to doorways, pharmaceutical scams, spam domains and warez, the provider is also utilizing basic marketing concepts like, for instance, promotions through coupon codes in an attempt to attract more customers.

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By Dancho Danchev

In need of a good reason to start using Craigslist ‘real email anonymization’ option? We’re about to give you a pretty good one. For years, the popular classified Web site has been under fire from spammers using DIY email collecting tools, allowing them to easily obtain fresh and valid emails to later be abused in fraudulent/malicious campaigns.

Let’s take a peek at some of the DIY Craigslist themed spamming tools currently in (commercial) circulation.

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How would a cybercriminal differentiate his unique value proposition (UVP) in order to attract new customers wanting to purchase commoditized underground market items like, for instance, harvested and segmented email databases? He’d impress them with comprehensiveness and ‘vertically integrated’ products and services. At least that’s what the cybercriminals behind the cybercrime-friendly market proposition I’m about to profile in this post are doing.

Tens of millions of harvested and segmented email databases, spam-ready bulletproof SMTP servers and DIY spamming tools, this one-stop-shop for novice spammers is also a great example of an OPSEC-unaware vendor who’s not only accepting Western Union/Money Gray payments, but also, has actually included his SWIFT wire transfer bank account details.

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Throughout the last couple of years, the persistent demand for geolocated traffic coming from both legitimate traffic exchanges or purely malicious ones — think traffic acquisition through illegally embedded iFrames — has been contributing to the growing market segment where traffic is bought, sold and re-sold, for the sole purpose of monetizing it through illegal means.

The ultimately objective? Expose users visiting compromised, or blackhat SEO-friendly automatically generated sites with bogus content, to fraudulent or malicious content in the form of impersonations of legitimate Web sites seeking accounting data, or client-side exploits silently served in an attempt to have an undetected piece of malware dropped on their hosts.

A recently spotted cybercrime-friendly underground traffic exchange service empowers cybercriminals with advanced targeting capabilities on per browser version basis, applies QA (Quality Assurance) to check their fraudulent/malicious domains against the most popular community/commercial based URL black lists, and ‘naturally’ we found evidence that it’s already been used to serve client-side exploits to unsuspecting users.

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Among the most common misconceptions about the way a novice cybercriminal would approach his potential victims has to do with the practice of having him looking for a ‘seed’ population to infect, so that he can then use the initially infected users as platform to scale his campaign. In reality though, that used to be the case for cybercriminals, years ago, when managed cybercrime-as-a-service types of underground market propositions were just beginning to materialize.

In 2013, the only thing a novice cybercriminal wanting to gain access to thousands of PCs located in a specific country has to do is to make a modest investment in the (managed) process of obtaining it. Let’s take a peek at one of the most recently launched such services.

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Apple Store users, beware!

A currently ongoing malicious spam campaign is attempting to trick users into thinking that they’ve successfully received a legitimate ‘Gift Card’ worth $200. What’s particularly interesting about this campaign is that the cybercriminal(s) behind it are mixing the infection vectors by relying on both a malicious attachment and a link to the same malware found in the malicious emails. Users can become infected by either executing the attachment or by clicking on the client-side exploits serving link found in the emails.

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In a series of blog posts, we’ve been highlighting the ease, automation, and sophistication of today’s customer-ized managed spam ‘solutions’, setting up the foundations for a successful fraudulent or purely malicious spam campaign, like the ones we intercept and protect against on a daily basis.

From bulletproof spam-friendly SMTP servers, to segmented harvested databases for any given country internationally, managed spamming appliances, to segmented databases of APT-friendly (advanced persistent threat) emails belonging to the U.S government/military, for years, the cybercriminals operating these managed services have been directly contributing to the epidemic dissemination of fraudulent/malicious emails internationally.

We’ve recently spotted a Russian one-stop-shop for spammers offering virtually everything a spammer can ‘vertically integrate’ into, in an attempt to occupy a bigger share of this underground market segment. Let’s take a peek at the service and discuss its unique value proposition (UVP).

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