McAfee Research Blog

Went Looking for IE Exploits in “Haiti”, Found Something Else

In my last post I mentioned that the “Operation Aurora” exploit code was public and that we could expect other attacks leveraging the CVE-2010-0249 exploit to emerge.  Given the significance of the recent earthquake in Haiti, and the slew of phishing sites, email scams, etc; it makes sense that attackers would try to incorporate an unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability and Haiti-related web content.

I figured a good place to look for attackers is by Googling the most popular search terms of the day.  It’s been a while since I last researched search engine manipulation.  As expected it was quite easy to find high ranking search results for Haiti-related terms; the vast majority led to rogue antivirus malicious sites, similar to earlier blogs.  I did not come across any sites exploiting the recent zero-day IE vulnerability.  However, I did come across plenty of Clickjacking, but not just Clickjacking, they have incorporated Google Trends, Digg.com, Blackhat SEO, and Clickfraud as well.

Here’s the apparent flow of the attack:

The attacker finds a hot search term using Google Trends or some other keyword tracking site (and perhaps anticipates term variations):

Next, they create the malicious web page (more below) and submit an entry to Digg.com using the same title, and a description that includes a bunch of relevant terms.  They also Digg the story (+1):

Seemingly the affiliation with Digg.com, the association of the title (taken from Google Trends), and description help boost the ranking in Google’s search results:

When a user following the link on Digg.com, they are taken to a generic website, enticing them to click on a “Play” icon.

What the user doesn’t see is the content that sits behind the image.  When a user clicks on the image, that click is passed along to an advertisement delivered through Google’s ad network (note the sites in the image below are potential victims here too as they could be charged for “unwanted clicks” on their ads).

This form of Clickfraud can generate money for the attacker.  If this fraud goes unnoticed, the advertiser would likely pay a referral fee to the attacker.

The web server shows many search terms seeded this way, including several related to Haiti:

• haiti-breaking-news
• haiti-earthquake-damage
• haiti-earthquake-info
• haiti-earthquake-relief
• haiti-earthquake-time
• haiti-pact-with-the-devil
• haiti-pat-robertson
• haiti-relief-effort
• haiti-support
• haitian-earthquake-relief
• haitian-relief-efforts
• hatia-earthquake-pictures

I should note that this isn’t so much a Haiti-targeted attack, but rather an attack targeted at any popular topic on the web right now.  In fact, they’re poisoning the term “internet security 2010 virus removal”, which exists because web users fell victim to rogue antivirus software, some undoubtedly due to the same type of search engine poisoning.

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