Waledac botnet - Operation b49

Waledac is a botnet which was deployed world wide for illegal operations. One of the 10 largest botnets in the US and a major distributor of spam globally, Survey puts an estimate that Waledac has infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world. Waledac  is capable of generating about 1.5 billion spam email messages a day, and is well-known for its online pharmacy, phony products, jobs, and penny stock spam scams. Waledac is considered to be the second version of the famous Storm. The worm may arrive on the computer as an attachment to spam email or via a link to a malicious Web site says Symantec. WALEDAC built its communication tactic by using an HTTP-based P2P communication network codenamed  HTTP2P and uses a complex variation of known technologies, including RSA and AES encryption using OpenSSL, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based message structure, bzip2 compression, and Base64 encoding says Trend micro. Botnets are deployed in a multitier architecture with the command and control center as the node. The CC is connected to, what is called as repeater nodes or tier of the Waledac botnet and is typically composed of infected computers with public IP addresses reachable on TCP port 80.

As discussed in the earlier articles, botnets are the modern tools preferred by cyber criminals to carryout  a variety of cyber attacks, build on the distributed power of lakhs of malware-infected recruited computers spread around the world to generate spam, carryout denial-of-service attacks on selected websites, including malware deployment and management apart from click frauds and other criminal activities. Waledac was believed to have the capacity to generate about 1.5 billion spam emails per day. Waledac infection data is presented at sudosecure.net. The enclosed image courtesy blogs.technet and microsoft.com very clearly indicates the levels of infection present in India.

Shamoon attack

A new malware surfaced during August 2012 as reported by the various security agencies.  The malware has been  dubbed by the code name  "Shamoon". The attack is called "Shamoon", due to a filename i.e. string of a folder name within the malware executable called as Shamoon. ("C:\Shamoon\ArabianGulf\wiper\release\wiper.pdb").The spyware infects all the computers in an internal network.

The main executable contains 3 resources, each maintains a ciphered program. PKCS12:112, PKCS7:113 and X509:116,  according to Dmitry. Symantec said that the malware, which it calls "W32:Disttrack," had infected fewer than 50 machines worldwide. The main Shamoon module has a resource PKCS7:113 that maintains an executable which is saved to disk as %WINDIR%\System32\NETINIT.EXE says Dmitry Tarakanov. He adds that the malware waits for CNC communication as evident from its communication module. He also talks about PKCS12:112 another module playing an important role. The details of shamoon's operation is explained  by Dmitry here.  Shamoon, is being used in targeted attacks against at least one organization in the energy sector, according to Symantec.

Flame

The Flame worm that has targeted computers in the Middle East is being called "the most sophisticated cyberweapon yet unleashed" by Kaspersky Lab researchers who discovered it The virus reportedly captures sensitive information through a variety of means — “sniffing” data sent across the Internet and internal networks, recording keystrokes, capturing screenshots while applications like messaging programs are running, even turning on a computer’s built-in microphone and recording audio of conversations, according to three cyber labs that detected it.