traducido por Federico Dilla
Chthonic: A new strain of Zeus
by Marcelo Lozano • 2014/12/23
Dmitry Bestuzhev, Director of Research and Analysis for Kaspersky Lab in America
Dmitry Bestuzhev, Director of Research and Analysis for Kaspersky Lab in America
A major new threat of malware called Chthonic targeting online banking systems and their customers has been detected by security analysts from Kaspersky Lab.
Identified as an evolution of the Zeus Trojan, Trojan-Banker.Win32.Chthonic, or Chthonic for short, is known to have affected more than 150 banks and 20 different payment systems in 15 countries, and seems destined mainly to attack institutions financial in the UK, Spain, United States, Russia, Japan and Italy.
Although Chthonic not yet been detected in Latin America, Dmitry Bestuzhev, Director of Research and Analysis Team for Kaspersky Lab United States, thinks his appearance in the region is only a matter of time. "As we have seen before with other threats, we anticipate that Chthonic will expand into our region but from the hand of local cybercriminals to take the technical or buy technologies that are behind this malware to spread regionally. Such schemes will commit crimes are very popular in our region and even have been used to the same banking Trojan Zeus "he said.
Chthonic fail functions of computers as webcam and keyboard to steal online banking credentials such as saved passwords. Attackers can also connect to your computer remotely and order to conduct transactions.
However, the main weapon of Chthonic is the injection via the web. This allows the Trojan insert your own code and images on the pages of bank charges the computer browser, which allows attackers to obtain the phone number of the victim, the one-time passwords and PIN numbers as well as details logon and password entered by the user.
The victims were infected through web links or email attachments that contain a document with the .DOC extension which provides a "back door" to the malicious code. The attachment contains a RTF document specifically designed to exploit the vulnerability CVE-2014-1761 in Microsoft Office products.
Once downloaded, the malicious code that contains an encrypted configuration file is injected into the msiexec.exe process and several malicious modules are installed on the machine.
So far Kaspersky Lab has discovered modules that can collect system information, steal saved passwords, log keystrokes, allowing remote access, and record video and sound via webcam and microphone, if the computer includes those functions .
In the case of one of the attacked Japanese banks, malware can hide warnings and inject bank, however, a script that allows attackers to perform various transactions using the victim's account.
Affected customers of Russian banks are greeted by totally fraudulent as soon as they log banking pages. This is achieved by Trojan creates an iframe with a copy of phishing website that has the same size as the original window.
Chthonic shares some similarities with other Trojans. Use the same cipher and download file Andromeda, the same encryption scheme that Zeus Trojan Zeus AES and V2, and similar to that used in ZeusVM and malware KINS virtual machine.
Fortunately, many fragments of the code used for web Chthonic for injections and can not be used, because the banks have changed the structure of the pages, and in some cases, domains.
"The discovery of Chthonic confirms that the Trojan ZeuS is still evolving. Malware authors are making full use of the latest techniques, aided considerably by filtration ZeuS source code. Chthonic is the next phase in the evolution of ZeuS. Zeus uses AES encryption, similar to that used by ZeusVM and KINS virtual machine, and the discharger Andromeda - to attack more and more financial institutions and their innocent increasingly sophisticated ways customers. We believe that certainly appear new ZeuS variants in the future, and we will continue tracking and analyzing threats to keep one step ahead of cyber criminals, "said Yury Namestnikov, Senior Malware Analyst at Kaspersky Lab and one of the researchers who worked in the investigation of the threat.
