Update on Gmail spam exploit

A couple of weeks ago I made a blog post based on a SecurityFocus vulnerability report suggesting that Gmail smtp servers could be abused by spammers. At the time, the exact details of the attack were not disclosed to give Google an opportunity to respond to the claims.

Since then, the INSERT security team have released the details of the attack including a proof of concept program for demonstration. The key point is that it's trivial to setup any e-mail address to Auto Forward messages to.

The idea is that a spammer could send a message from a blacklisted IP to a Gmail account they've setup to be a spam cannon. Then they would just need to mark the received message as not spam to allow that message to be forwarded in the future. After that, the blacklisted IP can send to the Gmail spam cannon address and have a script automate changes to the forwarding e-mail address to change the spam victim. In that way the spam message can could be relayed from Google's servers to other mailservers, possibly bypassing anti-spam filtering due to whitelists.

Google Caches Virus Popup

This evening I was looking at some of the spam found in my Gmail Spam folder. I started using Google Search to see if I could correlate some websites related to the spam. I did find some interesting things, such as the bad English "recorded for security purpose", found on one spam-related website, is copied across several spam-related sites. I was looking for some casual correlation to hopefully find some bad IP addresses not found in one of the top RBL sites, such as Spamhaus. Alas, Spamhaus had me beat. It knew them all.

But then I found something rather interesting. I came across a website with a pop-up, trying to get me to download a Windows executable file.



In order for this to work I'd have to click on the fake dialogue button "Continue". Then a real dialogue with an option for "Save As" appears, I download it, open it, and enjoy using my new virus. Okay, so nothing new and exciting there. It's a pretty simple website trying to con me into running their malicious code.

Now I was curious how many duplicate pages out there had the same pop-up, so I did a search for the text "You need to download new version of Video ActiveX Object to play this video file.".

I clicked on the first result.



But the page was gone.



I was really looking forward to that virus pop-up. Never mind, maybe Google Cache can help me out.





Excellent! The spammer took down the webpage linking to their exploit code, but luckily Google Cache was able to save a copy of the page, which popped-up the "Save As" dialogue, so I can now download it and enjoying start using my new virus, as it silently rips through my machine, stealing my personal data and emailing spam around world.

I uploaded this file to the Kaspersky Virus Scanner and it was identified as being "infected by Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Zlob.eob".

Oh no, I just realized. This exploit is not platform independent and will not run on my machine. It only runs on Windows and I'm using Ubuntu Linux. I guess I'll have to keep googling...

iTunes affected by zero day exploit

[Update: 29th November 2:30pm] Proof of concept code is now publicly available for this exploit on Mac OS X - Both Leopard and Tiger on Intel and PowerPC architectures are vulnerable.

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team released a note warning of a zero day exploit for the Apple QuickTime product. iTunes user's should be aware that they are also affected since QuickTime is a component of it.

The bad news is that the exploit code is already available and virus writers are no doubt scurrying to create an attack. To make matters worse, there isn't currently a patch available so the iTunes product is vulnerable even when updated. An attacker could use several methods to infect a machine such as simply connecting to a machine on the RTSP port, linking to a malicious file, sending the file as an e-mail attachment or using the web browser (javascript/plugins/ActiveX).