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Zero Day

Ryan Naraine, Emil Protalinski and Dancho Danchev

Password stealing malware masquerades as Firefox add-on

By | December 4, 2008, 7:05am PST

Summary: Malware researchers at BitDefender are reporting on a newly discovered malware (Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.B) that when once dropped in Firefox’s add-ons directory starts operating as such, and attempts to steal accounting data from a predefined list of over a hundred E-banking sites. Once the accounting data is obtained, it’s forwarded to a free web space hosting provider [...]

BitDefenderMalware researchers at BitDefender are reporting on a newly discovered malware (Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.B) that when once dropped in Firefox’s add-ons directory starts operating as such, and attempts to steal accounting data from a predefined list of over a hundred E-banking sites. Once the accounting data is obtained, it’s forwarded to a free web space hosting provider in Russia. Earlier this year, a more severe incident took place when the Vietnamese Language Pack hosted at Mozilla’s official list was infected with malware.

“It drops an executable file (which is a Firefox 3 plugin) and a JavaScript file (detected by Bitdefender as: Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A) into the Firefox plugins and chrome folders respectively. It filters the URLs within the Mozilla Firefox browser and whenever encounter the following addresses opened in the Firefox browser it captures the login credentials. It is the first malware that targets Firefox. The filtering is done by a JavaScript file running in Firefox’s chrome environment.”

MalwareDespite the novel approach used, the malware would have made a huge impact if it were released several years ago when E-banking authentication was still in its infancy since plain simple keylogging is one part of the session hijacking tactics used. And while they will indeed obtain the accounting data, this is no longer sufficient for a successful compromise of a bank account. In comparison, the techniques used by sophisticated crimeware like Zeus, Sinowal and Wsnpoem undermine the majority of two-factor authentication mechanisms used by E-banking providers, since once you start doing E-banking from a compromised environment nothing’s really what it seems to be anymore.

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Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response.

Disclosure

Dancho Danchev

More details on Dancho Danchev's current and past professional affiliations, can be found in his LinkedIn profile.

Biography

Dancho Danchev

Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog sharing real-time threats intelligence data with the rest of the community on a daily basis. More details on Dancho Danchev's current and past professional affiliations, can be found in his LinkedIn profile. You can also follow him on Twitter
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RE: Password stealing malware masquerades as Firefox add-on
birumut Updated - 5th May 2011
Great!!! thanks for sharing this information to us!
seslisohbet seslichat
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I am still curious about ISPs.
TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827 4th Dec 2008
Why is there a route from my ISP to the infamous Russian domain. How trivially easy would it be for TWC here in San Antonio to simply delete the ability for any packet to arrive at said domain. They know where it is, the exact IP range, and adding extra IP addresses where packets end up at this big bit bucket in the sky (/dev/null on some gateway) astounds me.

It isn't rocket surgery, it could eliminate the profit motive and decimate the malware revenue stream in literally days, wiping it out.

Come on TWC, take a chance, use one of your engineers and $128 in labor and simply remove these nasty IP addresses from being accessible.

TripleII
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Folks would lose their Russian porn
Michael Kelly 4th Dec 2008
and that would lose the ISP some customers.
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No, there is a specific domain.
TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827 4th Dec 2008
Not going to post it. It is not used for p0rn, it is 100% used for Russian hacking. You do post a valid point though, there are other sites that should be blacklisted that could actually be semi-legit (hacked or cracked) over there.

I still say though that any ISP could gain 100 fold if they introduced a policy and made it public that they were going to block, and add new blocks to specific known cracker domains.

TripleII
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Net Neutrality
LiquidLearner 4th Dec 2008
Your ISP provides you an internet connection. If they begin to dictate where you can go because it's "Bad for you" or "against the law" than they suddenly become responsible for ANYTHING you do on the web. Which means if they do that and you go somewhere else and download child porn the ISP then becomes responsible. Net Neutrality protects that but it also puts restrictions on what they can do. They can limit types of traffic but cannot block it. They can block incoming traffic but not outbound.

It's a legal issue. Sure, it would be nice. But it's better for all of us if we don't start down that road.
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Net Neutrality...
RS9 5th Dec 2008
I agree and disagree!

ISP's have no business blocking anything! The federal government either. (Except possibly real terrorist groups, not political comment they don't like).

Blocking an IP or domain is the right of an individual or private company, period.

I block all network activity to various domains from Brazil, Africa, Russia, China, etc. all the time!

I will block access to MY computer from whomever whenever as I wish!

That action taken on my behalf without my tacit approval or input by ISP's or the state, is plain old tyranny and must be resisted vigorously!
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RE: I am still curious about ISPs
fatman65535 5th Dec 2008
TripleII,

Unfortunately, you have to be the one to "stop them cold". As pointed out by another commenter, it is not a good thing for ISPs to get into the "filtering" business. We pay them to transmit data to and from our computers.

That being said, I suggest that you do what i have done. get a firewall and use it. I have gone to a site, called IPDeny, http://www.ipdeny.com/ipblocks/ downloaded the varied country IP address block, and manually added them to my firewall. Not the best solution, and not the easiest one, but at least it is under MY control.

FYI, I started with the CN zone, and then progressed to the RU zone.
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I think there could be concensus.
TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827 5th Dec 2008
There are famous and well know pure malicious domains out there. For my own use, I am not concerned, it is the millions out there who use a computer as a benign appliance. I am not talking about wholesale filtering, however, there are specific IPs and subnets that are world known nothing but malice. I believe a concerted effort by, for example, all ISPs could bring these networks to their knees in days.

Just as an example, web hack dot ru from here.
http://www.robtex.com/dns/web-hack.ru.html

filter it out, DDOS and probably 50% of all malware infected computers are useless, since the IPs are coded into the malware.

I'd love to head up oversight on something like this, because it doesn't exist. There is nothing, ever, good that came out of those 3 domain sites. Not only that, part of the filter can be notification to computer owners they are hacked.

TripleII
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opendns.com
Dr. John 5th Dec 2008
OpenDNS works great. I've got those sites, and quite a few others, blocked. Both at work, and at home, trying to get to those sites gets you a notice from OpenDNS that the site has been blocked by the admin of the network.

Really tweaked some cookies around here when people could no longer waste countless paid hours at myspace, too.
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Cut them off from the world
Carrion 4th Dec 2008
How long would these sites last if we told the hosting country that we would no longer accept Internet traffic from them due to security risks to our citizens?
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All it takes is will, of which there is none.
TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827 4th Dec 2008
ISPs don't care, and won't take any steps to simply cut them off for fear or anyone complaining.

TripleII
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...
LiquidLearner 4th Dec 2008
Please do a bit more research before making these kind of statements.
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What research?
TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827 4th Dec 2008
They can do this easily, not one single ISP is doing anything to prevent malicious traffic or website access. It takes a concerted effort to force an ISP to enforce their own "terms of service", in one case, I had to threaten a lawsuit to get a bot in Arkansas brought down. They don't care, so long as everyone pays their bill.

They can and probably do already know every one of the 40% of Windows computers compromised in their network, spewing Vi@gra emails and performing DDOS attacks and do NOTHING about it.

What are you are talking about.

TripleII
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It's Not a matter of research
Tyr.Anasazi@... 17th Dec 2008
at least for the ISPs...it's a matter of consumer education. I don't want my ISP controlling my internet access when that's what *I* should be doing.
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It's been thought of, it's been done, but ...
terry flores Updated - 5th Dec 2008
re: "Cut them off from the world"

It is not really effective. With today's networks and remote hosting options, it is quite easy to move an illegal operation around the world in minutes. If you start killing off connectivity to certain providers in Russia, the bad guys just move their stuff to China, Finland, Bulgaria, Brazil, or anywhere else in the world (including the US) that has access and cheap or free hosting.

I can get a free email account in 75 different countries in a couple of minutes. I can put up a minimal web server for almost nothing. I can spread a sophisticated spoof site over multiple hosts and ISPs to avoid detection. Just as the Internet provides huge possibilities for good, it also provides bountiful resources for the bad guys.

One more thing. In the coming recession/depression things are going to get worse, not better. Hosting companies and ISPs are going to have less resources to police their own operations, and they are going to have powerful incentives (money) to look the other way when illicit activities are taking place.

Illegal but profitable endeavors ALWAYS thrive when times are hard. Often with the complicity and cooperation of otherwise respectable companies and citizens, who are just looking for any way to make ends meet.
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Just how does this work?
balaknair Updated - 5th Dec 2008
Do you have to install the addon or does it automatically download itself(like a drive-by download) to the plugins folder?
In other words, is any user interaction needed?

EDIT:
Never mind, got it.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/04/Firefox_users_targeted_by_rare_piece_of_malware_1.html

"Users could be infected with the Trojan either from a drive-by download, which can infect a PC by exploiting a vulnerability in a browser, or by being duped into downloading it, Canja said.

When it runs on a PC, it registers itself in Firefox's system files as "Greasemonkey," a well-known collection of scripts that add extra functionality to Web pages rendered by Firefox."
To me this article is useless. It does not tell an end user how to even see if they have this on there machine. It's like telling me I won a million dollars but leaves it at that. What is the point of the article?
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Ditto! [NT]
RS9 5th Dec 2008
.
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Not useless
tolique 8th Dec 2008
First of all you need to have an antivirus for your protection and preferably you should do a scan with bitdefender as they have discovered it and they surely have the definitions up to date.

Second if you would have looked to bitdefender's encyclopedia you would have known:

Presence of the: "%ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\npbasic.dll"
"%ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\chrome\chrome\content\browser.js"
files in the Mozilla Firefox's plugins and chrome folders.
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WHICH Add-on IS it?...
btljooz 5th Dec 2008
Either the title to this article is misleading as Hades or the article is not complete or BOTH!!! grrr!!!

Now, EXACTLY *HOW* is this virus spread??? EXACTLY *WHAT* is the NAME of the Add-on that is referred to in the title of this article?????

Without that information this "article" is simply yellow journalism at its finest!!!!!
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Carefull!
RS9 5th Dec 2008
ZDnet is getting really aggressive about strong opinions!

If you stray too far from "PC" speech, your BLOCKED!

Don't you know your post "looks" nasty?
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No add-on
tolique 8th Dec 2008
As I've explained to Vquest55 bitdefender detects this trojan that installs as a plugin in FF. This isn't a bug in FF it's just a trojan that masquerades itself in an add-on and that add-on would be Greasmoneky.

It drops an executable file (which is a Firefox 3 plugin) and a JavaScript file (detected by Bitdefender as: Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A) into the Firefox plugins and chrome folders respectively.


The trojan itself is named by bitdefender Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.B and a link on how this behaves is available in ZDNet's article.
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risk factor per OS: Windows, Apple, Linux
binstock@... 5th Dec 2008
'Twould be informative to specify relative risk for Windows, Apple, and Linux.
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Since it's a Firefox add-on...
fairportfan 11th Dec 2008
...I would guess it's pretty well OS-independent.
What is the point of issuing an alert regarding malware if the alert does not inform me as to the name of the malware about which I am being alerted? "BE AFRAID" is not terribly helpful. Am I do simply avoid all Firefox add-ons, or avoid Firefox altogether? I don't know if this is yellow journalism, but it is most certainly unhelpful and incomplete journalism.
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Do a minute of research!
macawtat 6th Dec 2008
While i agree it would have been nice to have been provided with detailed information regarding the trojan, it took me under a minute to search the name of the trojan to find the information on BitDefender regarding the files to look for on your computer. And no, I am not going to tell you what they are, try searching for yourself.
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Re-search
Transdermal 7th Dec 2008
Cute. I know and I'm not telling you. Aren't I great?
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A minute for you, is an hour for me!
christine yan 30th Dec 2008
I am a total non-techie who is struggling to learn how to be a responsible computer user. What takes you a minute would probably take me an hour. I don't always have an hour to spare to look things up. (I even had to google what BitDefender was.) It's only by reading the other responses in this thread that I found out exactly which files I should look for. (Thanks for that info!) As a writer, I can say that the article would definitely have been more complete had the file names been mentioned. But I guess newbies like me are not their target reader.
Vista is malware susceptible too. BFN
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Vista IE is malware suscep BFN
donnydo77@... 8th Dec 2008
trojanviewer beware
Oh, for Pete's sake! What is the add-on? Surely ZDNET has the information or they would not have published this article. C'mon, ZDNET what is the add-on?
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X-Squeeze Me???
QueenMama 11th Dec 2008
How about telling us whether this is just for Windows boxes or ALL operating systems! I use Firefox on a Mac.

Bad reporting all the way around, guys!
In my experience, the public is wide open to whatever toolbars and browser add-ons are made conveniently available at no charge. I expect this to be an area of growth for hackers and data thieves.

In general, it is hard to educate the public against threats that attack through common, widely used mechanisms. Even within the IT industry, there is little appreciation of the fact that every capability brings with it another set of potential attacks. "Progress" in computing occurs at such a high speed that the malware opportunities we plant each day will pollute the future for years to come.

I think the situation in computing today is somewhat like the halcyon days of chemical technology. The opportunities that are opened up by new developments are so glamorous that it will be years before we discover some of the down-side effects.

BTW- My nomination for one of the latest insidious technological traps is "cloud computing."
Poor, poor repporting... no clues for the un-clued...
Has anyone mentioned reliability/accountability as related to what is published?
I use Netscape, at browser.Netscape.com, Releases link. You don't have the constant barrage/assault of updates coming in, and most sites still work.

God Bless, Dan P
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Great!!! thanks for sharing this information to us!
seslisohbet seslichat

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