LadyBoyle comes to town with a new exploit

By now you have probably heard of the new zero-day exploit in Adobe flash that was patched today. FireEye Labs identified the exploit in the wild on 02/05/2013, which based on the compile time and document creation time is the same day the malicious payload was generated. Adobe PSIRT has released information about this threat here. They have also released an advisory with details on versions and platforms affected along with applicable patches. The two exploits have been assigned CVE-2013-0633 and CVE-2013-0634. It is highly recommended that you apply this patch right away, as this threat is active in the wild.

An Encounter with Trojan Nap

We recently encountered a stealthy malware that employs extended sleep calls to evade automated analysis systems capturing its behavior. It further makes use of the fast flux technique in order to hide the identity of the attacker controlling it. We call it Trojan Nap. The purpose of this blog is to share the technical details of the execution steps by Nap.

Operation Beebus

FireEye discovered an APT campaign consistently targeting companies in the aerospace and defense industries. The campaign has been in effect for sometime now.

Infection Vector

We have seen this campaign use both email and drive-by downloads as a means of infecting end users. The threat actor has consistently used attachment names of documents/white papers released by well-known companies. The malicious email attachment exploits some common vulnerabilities in PDF and DOC files.

Hackers Targeting Taiwanese Technology Firm

In the past, hackers have attempted to compromise targeted organizations by sending phishing email directly to their users. However, there seems to be a shift away from this trend in the recent years. Hackers were observed to conduct multi-prong approaches to targeting the organization of interest and their affiliated companies. For example, in July 2011, ESTsoft’s ALZip update server was compromised in an attack on CyWorld and Nate users.¹

In one of our investigations, a malicious email was found to be targeting a Taiwanese technology company that deals heavily with the finance services industry (FSI) and the government in Taiwan (see Figure 1 below). To trick the user into opening the malicious document, the attacker made use of an announcement by the Taiwanese Ministry of Finance (see Figure 2).

Happy New Year from New Java Zero-Day

We observed that a Java security bypass zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2013-0422) has been actively exploited in the wild starting Jan. 2. We have been able to reproduce the attack in-house with the latest Java 7 update (Java 7 update 10) on Windows.

We initially wanted to hold off on posting this blog entry until we received confirmation from Oracle; however, since other researchers are starting to blog on this issue, we have decided to release our summary. We will continue our research and continue to share more information.

CFR Watering Hole Attack Details

[Updated on December 30, 2012] On December 27, we received reports that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) website was compromised and hosting malicious content on or around 2:00 PM EST on Wednesday, December 26. Through our Malware Protection Cloud, we can confirm that the website was compromised at that time, but we can also confirm that the CFR website was also hosting the malicious content as early as Friday, December 21—right before a major U.S. holiday.