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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master
NRT-0222 Hackers Use "Construction Kit" to Unleash Trojan Variants:
Multiple hacker groups are using a "construction kit" supplied by the author of a Trojan horse program discovered last October to develop and unleash more dangerous variants of the original malware. Such variants have stolen sensitive information belonging to at least 10,000 individuals and sent the data to rogue servers in China, Russia, and the US, according to Don Jackson, a security researcher at SecureWorks Inc. of Atlanta. The stolen data includes Social Security Numbers, online account information, bank account and credit card numbers, user names and passwords and other data that users would usually input during an SSL protected session. The Prg Trojan, as it has been dubbed by SecureWorks, is a variant of another Trojan called wnspoem that was identified in October. Like its predecessor, the Prg Trojan and its variants, are designed to sniff sensitive data from Windows internal memory buffers before the data is encrypted and sent to SSL-protected web sites. The Trojans are programmed to send the stolen data to multiple servers around the world where it is stored in encrypted fashion and sold to others looking for such information. An analysis of log files on the servers storing the stolen data shows that a lot of the information is coming from corporate computers, Jackson said.
The newer variants are more configurable and can be programmed to send stolen data to their final destination via a chain of proxy servers. They also encrypt stolen data differently than the original version, making older analysis tools obsolete, Jackson said.
What makes the threat from the Prg Trojan especially potent is the availability of a construction tool kit that allows hackers to develop and release new versions of the code faster than antivirus vendors can devise solutions, Jackson said. The toolkit allows hackers to recompile and pack the malicious code in countelss subtly different ways so as to evade detection by antivirus engines typically looking for specific signatures to identify and block threats, Jackson said.
The toolkit appears to have been developed by the Russian authors of the original wnspoem Trojan and comes complete with a three-page manual in Russian instructing buyers how to use it. Originally, the kit appears to have been sold to other hacker groups for around $1,000, but more recently it appears to have been posted on an underground site, where others have been downloading and using it, Jackson said.
(www.computerworld.com 25JUN07)