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Is Epic Turla Exploiting Windows XP?
Kaspersky Lab has discovered an espionage network that successfully attacked government institutions, intelligence agencies and European companies.
The firm has dubbed the spy operation Epic Turla, and said that it is in no doubt about its capabilities.
“Over the last 10 months, Kaspersky Lab researchers have analyzed a massive cyber-espionage operation which we call ‘Epic Turla’,” it said.
“The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries, including government institutions, embassies, military, education, research and pharmaceutical companies.”
Kaspersky said that Epic Turla used two zero-day exploits that affected Adobe and Microsoft software, along with some backdoor and social engineering tricks.
In particular, Kaspersky said a vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows 2003 – CVE-2013-5065 – termed a “privilege escalation vulnerability” is being used. “The CVE-2013-5065 exploit allows the backdoor to achieve administrator privileges on the system and run unrestricted. This exploit only works on unpatched Microsoft Windows XP systems.”
The use of this Windows XP flaw underlines the risk that the unsupported Windows XP OS poses. Kaspersky went on to explain that, once inside, attackers install their own rootkits and other malware tools and begin their surveillance.
“Once the attackers obtain the necessary credentials without the victim noticing, they deploy the rootkit and other extreme persistence mechanisms,” it said. “The attacks are still ongoing as of July 2014, actively targeting users in Europe and the Middle East.”
The attacks are just the latest in a long line of incidents that businesses need to be aware of as cyber attacks continue at an alarming rate.
In June the security firm Crowdstrike alerted the industry to Putter Panda, a cute-sounding but nasty piece of malware. That firm pointed an accusatory finger at China and charged it with espionage on the US and Europe.
Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said at the time, “China’s decade-long economic espionage campaign is massive and unrelenting. Through widespread espionage campaigns, Chinese threat actors are targeting companies and governments in every part of the globe.” Chinese authorities disputed this.
The report comes in the same week Hold Security reported uncovering a huge trove of 1.2 billion web passwords and login details that have been gathered by Russian cyber criminals.
Is Malware Wreaking Havoc On XP?
One of the top three malware programs affecting businesses in the second quarter is a worm that takes advantage of the large number of companies still using Windows XP, Trend Micro has warned.
The worm, dubbed DOWNAD, also known as Conficker, can infect an entire network via a malicious URL, spam email, or removable drive. Windows XP is particularly susceptible to this threat because it is known to exploit the MS08-067 Server service vulnerability in order to execute arbitrary code.
DOWNAD also has its own domain generation algorithm (DGA) that allows it to create randomly-generated URLs. It then connects to these created URLs to download files to the system. Trend Micro said that around 175 IP addresses are found to be related to the DOWNAD worm and that these IP addresses use various ports and are randomly generated via the DGA capability of DOWNAD.
“During our monitoring of the spam landscape, we observed that in Q2, more than 40 percent of malware related spam mails are delivered by machines infected by DOWNAD worm,” said Trend Micro anti-spam research engineer Maria Manly in a blog post.
“A number of machines are still infected by this threat and leveraged to send the spammed messages to further increase the number of infected systems. And with Microsoft ending the support for Windows XP this year, we can expect that systems with this OS can be infected by threats like DOWNAD.”
The security company warned that spam campaigns delivering FAREIT, MYTOB, and LOVGATE payloads in email attachments are attributed to DOWNAD infected machines. FAREIT is a malware family of information stealers that download variants of the Zeus Trojan, while MYTOB is an old family of worms known for sending a copy of itself in spam attachments.
The other top sources of spam with malware are the CUTWAIL botnet, together with Gameover ZeuS (GoZ). Manly said CUTWAIL was actually previously used to download GoZ malware but now a malware called UPATRE employs GoZ malware or variants of ZBOT which have peer-to-peer functionality.
“In the last few weeks we have reported various spam runs that abused Dropbox links to host malware like UPATRE,” Manly said. “We also spotted a spammed message in the guise of voice mail that contains a Cryptolocker variant. The latest we have seen is a spam campaign with links that leveraged CUBBY, a file storage service, this time carrying a banking malware detected as TSPY_BANKER.WSTA.”
According to Manly, cybercriminals and threat actors are probably abusing file storage platforms to mask their malicious activities and go undetected in the system and network.
“As spam with malware attachment continues to proliferate, so is spam with links carrying malicious files. The continuous abuse of file hosting services to spread malware appears to have become a favoured infection vector of cyber criminals most likely because this makes it more effective given that the URLs are legitimate thereby increasing the chance of bypassing anti-spam filters,” she added.
Can Malwarebytes Protect XP?
Malwarebytes has launched anti-exploit services to protect Windows users from hacking attacks on vulnerabilities in popular targets including Microsoft Office, Adobe software products and Java, a service which even offers protection for Windows XP users.
Consumer, Premium and Corporate versions of the service are available, and are designed to pre-emptively stop hackers from infecting Windows machines with malware.
“An exploit will typically first corrupt the memory of an application process, take control, then execute code,” said Malwarebytes director of special projects Pedro Bustamante.
“From the shell code it executes a payload that tells the exploit what to do and that in turn usually downloads malware from the internet and executes it. The final stage is usually where antivirus kicks in, when it’s being downloaded from the internet, and starts doing things like behavioural analysis to see if it’s malicious.
“We don’t care about that, what we do comes before then. We just look for exploit-like behaviour and block anything that looks like it at the shellcode or payload stages. We come into play before the malware even appears on the scene.”
The Consumer version of the anti-exploit service is free and offers basic browser and Java protection.
The Premium version costs $37.00 per user and adds Office and Adobe protection services as well as the ability to add custom shields to other internet-facing applications, like Messenger or Netflix.
The Corporate version costs$40.00 person user and offers complete anti-exploit protection and comes with Malwarebytes’ Anti-malware service and a toolkit for IT managers.
Bustamante explained that the technology is designed to help businesses and general web users defend against the new wave of exploit-based cyber attacks.
“Traditional security can’t deal with exploits. Every day we see people getting infected, even if they have the latest up-to-date antivirus readers, because of exploits,” he said. “This is why we care about the applications you run – Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Java, Acrobat [and Microsoft] Word, Excel [and] Powerpoint.”
Bustamante added that the service is doubly important for Windows XP users since Microsoft officially ceased support for the OS in April.
“We’re still seeing over 25 percent of our users running XP. For them this product is even more important,” he said.
“We see new zero-days if not every week, every month, and for XP users who are not getting any more patches from Microsoft this product will be essential.
“Every month Microsoft will be releasing security patches for newer versions of Windows. Every time Microsoft does this it’ll be a treasure map for hackers to find exploits on Windows XP.
“It’ll show them exactly where the vulnerabilities are, so every month will see an influx of new exploits targeting Windows XP.”
Dell Bets On Windows 8
Demand for Windows 8 may be still somewhat lukewarm, but Dell is maintaining its stance that it is the best operating system for business tablets and plans to roll out more Windows 8-based products later this year, according to a senior executive at the computer maker.
“Our Windows tablets are more secure and easier to manage than Android-based products and iOS-based products [because Windows is] on our tablets,” said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and president of global operations at Dell. “And we are not going to change that.”
Windows-based devices accounted for just 4.5% of tablet sales in this year’s second quarter, according to research firm IDC. In comparison, Android-based devices had 62.6% of the tablet market and Apple’s iPad had 32.5%.
The slow adoption of Windows 8 tablets is partly due to their high prices, and to the operating system’s lack of mobile apps, analysts say. Windows 8 has also received mixed reviews, with some people citing its lack of a Start button in the desktop mode as a major problem.
But Dell expects demand for Windows 8 devices to pick up with the availability of Windows 8.1, which Microsoft will release in October.