Want to be your friend on Facebook? A Fake Facebook Request

Malicious spam messages generated by the infamous Cutwail botnet are targeting Facebook users as potential banking Trojan victims.

The messages arrive in the guise of a Facebook friend invite notification. The emails look genuine enough on casual inspection, thanks to the malware-spinners' apparent use of a genuine Facebook template. But where a genuine Facebook invite contains links to the real social networking site, the malicious emails feature custom links to malware sites. In addition, the emails differ from the genuine article because they do not feature Facebook profile photos. The recipient's email address is also absent from the fine print at the bottom of the bogus invites.

Users tricked into clicking on the malicious link are exposed to a double-barrelled malware based attack. Firstly they are offered a bogus Adobe Flash update. In addition, clicking on the link opens a hidden iFrame, which then loads data from a remote server hosting the Blackhole Exploit Kit. The exploit kit attempts to exploit browser security holes, most notably involving insecure Java installations.

Both techniques attempt to download a variant of the infamous ZeuS banking Trojan onto compromised systems. Impersonating email notifications from Facebook is a common enough technique among spammers and purveyors of survey scams, but I've never seen it applied to punt banking Trojans before.

A full write-up of the scam can be found in a blog post by M86 Security here.

Java surpasses Adobe kit as most attacked software

Oracle's Java framework has surpassed Adobe applications as the most attacked software package, according to a Microsoft researcher who warned she was seeing “an unprecedented wave of Java exploitation.”

The spike began in the third-quarter of last year and has climbed steadily since, according to data reported on Monday by Holly Stewart, a member of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. By the beginning of this year, the number of Java exploits “had well surpassed the total number of Adobe-related exploits we monitored,” she said.

The spike is mostly driven by attacks on three separate vulnerabilities that Oracle patched long ago. As a result attacks on Java have “gone from hundreds of thousands per quarter to millions,” Stewart blogged.

As Microsoft has released new versions of its software that are harder to exploit, attackers looking for ways to install malware have turned their attention to other ubiquitous PC titles. With a massive share of Windows machines, Adobe Reader emerged earlier this year as the world's most exploited app, according to antivirus provider F-Secure. Adobe's Flash Player, also because of its broad base of users, has long been a favorite as well.

Java, which Oracle inherited from Sun Microsystems, has remained vulnerable, too, and exploits are now coming into the mainstream. One of the things driving the trend, according to security reporter Brian Krebs, are updates that add Java attacks to Eleonore, Crimepack and other exploit kits that malware purveyors use to streamline the installation of malware on victim machines.

“Java is ubiquitous, and, as was once true with browsers and document readers like Adobe, people don't think to update it,” Stewart wrote. “On top of that, Java is a technology that runs in the background to make more visible components work.”

The software has never lived up to many of the promises that Sun made about it. Chances are it can be uninstalled from most desktop machines and the user won't even notice.