Phishers and Malware authors beware!

Posted by Brian Rakowski and Garrett Casto, Anti-Phishing and Anti-Malware Teams

OK, so it might be a little early to declare victory, but we're excited about the Safe Browsing API we launched today. It provides a simple mechanism for downloading Google's lists of suspected phishing and malware URLs, so now any developer can access the blacklists used in products such as Firefox and Google Desktop.

The API is still experimental, but we hope it will be useful to ISPs, web-hosting companies, and anyone building a site or an application that publishes or transmits user-generated links. Sign up for a key and let us know how we can make the API better. We fully expect to iterate on the design and improve the data behind the API, and we'll be paying close attention to your feedback as we do that. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thwarting a large-scale phishing attack

Posted by Colin Whittaker, Anti-Phishing Team

In addition to targeting malware, we're interested in combating phishing, a social engineering attack where criminals attempt to lure unsuspecting web surfers into logging into a fake website that looks like a real website, such as eBay, E-gold or an online bank. Following a successful attack, phishers can steal money out of the victims' accounts or take their identities. To protect our users against phishing, we publish a blacklist of known phishing sites. This blacklist is the basis for the anti-phishing features in the latest versions of Firefox and Google Desktop. Although blacklists are necessarily a step behind as phishers move their phishing pages around, blacklists have proved to be reasonably effective.

Not all phishing attacks target sites with obvious financial value. Beginning in mid-March, we detected a five-fold increase in overall phishing page views. It turned out that the phishing pages generating 95% of the new phishing traffic targeted MySpace, the popular social networking site. While a MySpace account does not have any intrinsic monetary value, phishers had come up with ways to monetize this attack. We observed hijacked accounts being used to spread bulletin board spam for some advertising revenue. According to this interview with a phisher, phishers also logged in to the email accounts of the profile owners to harvest financial account information. In any case, phishing MySpace became profitable enough (more than phishing more traditional targets) that many of the active phishers began targeting it.

Interestingly, the attack vector for this new attack appeared to be MySpace itself, rather than the usual email spam. To observe the phishers' actions, we fed them the login information for a dummy MySpace account. We saw that when phishers compromised a MySpace account, they added links to their phishing page on the stolen profile, which would in turn result in additional users getting compromised. Using a quirk of the CSS supported in MySpace profiles, the phishers injected these links invisibly as see-through images covering compromised profiles. Clicking anywhere on an infected profile, including on links that appeared normal, redirected the user to a phishing page. Here's a sample of some CSS code injected into the "About Me" section of an affected profile:

<a style="text-decoration:none;position:
absolute;top:1px;left:1px;" href="http://myspacev.net"><img
style="border-width:0px;width:1200px; height:650px;"
src="http://x.myspace.com/images/clear.gif"></a></style>

In addition to contributing to the viral growth of the phishing attack, linking directly off of real MySpace content added to the appearance of legitimacy of these phishing pages. In fact, we received thousands of complaints from confused users along the lines of "Why won't it let any of my friends look at my pictures?" regarding our warnings on these phishing pages, suggesting that even an explicit warning was not enough to protect many users. The effectiveness of the attack and the increasing sophistication of the phishing pages, some of which were hosted on botnets and were near perfect duplications of MySpace's login page, meant that we needed to switch tactics to combat this new threat.

In late March, we reached out to MySpace to see what we could do to help. We provided lists of the top phishing sites and our anti-phishing blacklist to MySpace so that they could disable compromised accounts with links to those sites. Unfortunately, many of the blocked users did not remove the phishing links when they reactivated their accounts, so the attacks continued to spread. On April 19, MySpace updated their server software so that they could disable bad links in users' profiles without requiring any user action or altering any other profile content. Overnight, overall phishing traffic dropped by a factor of five back to the levels observed in early March. While MySpace phishing continues at much lower volumes, phishers are beginning to move on to new targets.

Things you can do to help end phishing and Internet fraud

• Learn to recognize and avoid phishing. The Anti-Phishing Working Group has a good list of recommendations.
  


• Update your software regularly and run an anti-virus program. If a cyber-criminal gains control of your computer through a virus or a software security flaw, he doesn't need to resort to phishing to steal your information.
  


• Use different passwords on different sites and change them periodically. Phishers routinely try to log in to high-value targets, like online banking sites, with the passwords they steal for lower-value sites, like webmail and social networking services.

Web Server Software and Malware

Posted by Nagendra Modadugu, Anti-Malware Team

In this post, we investigate the distribution of web server software to provide insight into how server software is correlated to servers hosting malware binaries or engaging in drive-by-downloads.

We determine server operating system by examining the 'Server:' HTTP header reported by most web servers. A survey of servers running roughly 80 million domain names reveals the web server software distribution shown below. Note that these figures may have some margin of error as it is not unusual to find hundreds of domains served by a single IP address.

Web server software across the Internet.

Web server software distribution across the Internet.

Our numbers report a slightly larger fraction of Apache servers compared to the Netcraft web server survey. Our analysis is based on crawl information and only root URLs were examined, therefore hosts that did not present a root URL (e.g. /index.htm) were not included in the statistics. This may have contributed to the disparity with the Netcraft numbers.

Amongst Apache servers, about 35% did not report any version information. Presumably the lack of version information is considered to be a defense against version specific attacks and worms. We observed a long tail of Apache server versions; the top three detected were 1.3.37 (15%), 1.3.33 (7.91%), and 2.0.54 (6.25%).

Amongst Microsoft servers, IIS 6.0 is by far the most popular version, making up about 80% of all IIS servers. IIS 5.0 made up most of the remainder.

Web server software across servers distributing malware.

We examined about 70,000 domains that over the past month have been either distributing malware or have been responsible for hosting browser exploits leading to drive-by-downloads. The breakdown by server software is depicted below. It is important to note that while many servers serve malware as a result of a server compromise (by remote exploits, password theft via keyloggers, etc.), some servers are configured to serve up exploits by their administrators.

Web server software distribution across malicious servers.

Compared to our sample of servers across the Internet, Microsoft IIS features twice as often (49% vs. 23%) as a malware distributing server. Amongst Microsoft IIS servers, the share of IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.0 remained the same at 80% and 20% respectively.

The distribution of top featured Apache server versions was different this time: 1.3.37 (50%), 1.3.34 (12%) and 1.3.33 (5%). 21% of the Apache servers did not report any version information. Incidentally, version 1.3.37 is the latest Apache server release in the 1.3 series, and it is hence somewhat of a surprise that this version features so prominently. One other factor we observe is a vast collection of Apache modules in use.

Distribution of web server software by country.

Web server distribution by country

Malicious web server distribution by country

The figure on the left shows the distribution of all Apache, IIS, and nginx webservers by country. Apache has the largest share, even though there is noticeable variation between countries. The figure on the right shows the distribution, by country, of webserver software of servers either distributing malware or hosting browser exploits. It is very interesting to see that in China and South Korea, a malicious server is much more likely to be running IIS than Apache.

We suspect that the causes for IIS featuring more prominently in these countries could be due to a combination of factors: first, automatic updates have not been enabled due to software piracy (piracy statistics from NationMaster, and BSA), and second, some security patches are not available for pirated copies of Microsoft operating systems. For instance the patch for a commonly seen ADODB.Stream exploit is not available to pirated copies of Windows operating systems.

Overall, we see a mix of results. In Germany, for instance, Apache is more likely to be serving malware than Microsoft IIS, compared to the overall distributions of these servers. In Asia, we see the reverse, which is part of the cause of Microsoft IIS having a disproportionately high representation at 49% of malware servers. In summary, our analysis demonstrates how important it is to keep web servers patched to the latest patch level.