April 9th, 2009

Conficker botnet stirs, with a scareware business model

Posted by Ryan Naraine @ 8:36 am

Categories: Anti Virus, Arbitrary Code Execution, Botnets, Browsers, Data theft, Denial of Service (DoS), Exploit code, Malware, Microsoft, Passwords, Patch Watch, Pen testing, Rootkits, Spam and Phishing, Spyware and Adware, Viruses and Worms

Tags: Antivirus, Conficker, Gostev, Waledac, Viruses And Worms, Security, Ryan Naraine

The Conficker botnet has stirred to life, using its peer-to-peer communication system to update itself and download scareware (fake anti-virus programs) to millions of infected Windows machines.

The Conficker update comes a week after a heavily-hyped April 1st activation date and provides the first sign of the motivation behind this malware threat — financially motivated cybercrime.

[ SEE: Eyeballing Conficker with eye-charts and maps ]

My colleague at Kaspersky Lab (see disclosure) Alex Gostev, has analyzed the latest samples and found the scareware/fraudware association, which means that millions of Conficker-infected machines will start getting pop-ups pushing a fake $49.95 security scanner.

Gostev writes:

One of the files is a rogue anti-virus app, which we detect as FraudTool.Win32.SpywareProtect2009.s. The first version of Kido (Conficker), detected back in November 2008, also downloaded fake antivirus to the infected machine. And once again, six months later, we’ve got unknown cybercriminals using the same trick.

The rogue software, SpywareProtect2009, can be found on spy-protect-2009.com., spywrprotect-2009.com, spywareprotector-2009.com.

[ SEE: German researchers score Conficker detection breakthrough ]

At the moment, the rogue anti-virus comes from sites located in Ukraine, Gostev said.  Mozilla Firefox is blocking access to the scareware sites.

Gostev also found the latest version of Conficker downloading the Waledac e-mail worm onto the infected systems.   Waledac is a known botnet linked to data theft and e-mail spam campaigns.

Over at Threatpost.com, we’ve prepared a detailed Conficker FAQ and provided a disinfection tool for affected Windows users.  Also see the Techmeme discussion on the latest mutant.

MORE ON CONFICKER:

• Googling for Conficker clean-up information? Be careful
  
• Researchers make Conficker breakthrough
  
• CBS 60 Minutes covers Conficker, malware epidemic