REPRINT of http://contagiodump.blogspot.com/2013/09/sandbox-miming-cve-2012-0158-in-mhtml.html Sandbox MIMIng. CVE-2012-0158 in MHTML samples and analysis Unpublished May 27, 2024

Wikipedia

Update - Sept 4, 2013
I added more descriptions and changed NjRat / Backdoor.LV to Vidgrab - in the traffic communications are similar to NjRat/Backdoor;lv but it does not use base64 and sends initial request starting with ...3 (0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x33) followed by null bytes  - it does not start with  lv|

I am still looking for names for a few other backdoors below, so if you recognize them, please let me know. 

Recently, my custom sandbox has been trying to open some Word attachments in a browser because the filetype fingerprint service detected them as MIME HTML files. Browsers are usually the default applications for such types and they did contain the CVE-2012-0158 exploit. A quick Google lookup yielded a May 2013 report from the Chinese company Antiy  "The Latest APT Attack by Exploiting CVE-2012-0158 Vulnerability", which described this new exploit vector.
Antiy noted that these MHTML files evade antivirus and indeed only half of vendors represented on Virustotal detect. However, many companies rely on their automated tools, inline and standalone sandboxes not just Antivirus to determine if the file is malicious.

I checked how these files (file without any extension) were processed by other commercial and open source mailboxes. 3 out of 5 well known commercial and open source mail scan and web sandbox vendors returned no output or informed me that that filetype was not supported. While writing this post, I noticed that Malwaretracker also mentioned the rise in this vector usage in his post on Friday, so I am sure the sandbox vendors are fixing the issue as we speak.

I checked 25 MHTML CVE-2012-0158 files and compared their targets (at least those I could obtain) and payload. The analysis showed a good variety of trojans and predominantly human rights (Tibet, Uyghur) activists. I will post a month worth of these files.

DeepEnd Research: Under this rock... Vulnerable Wordpress/Joomla sites... Overview of the RFI botnet malware arsenal

Exploits directed at Wordpress and/or Joomla content management systems(CMS) have been increasing at a dramatic rate over the past year. Internet blogs and forums are flooded with posts about hacked CMS installations. Popular jargon refers to the attackers as "hackers", but it is generally understood that these mass compromises are being performed via automated scanners and tools. However, we believe that there is not enough coverage of the actual malware involved.

One such infection scheme is essentially the following:

A downloader trojan  (Mutopy  - Win32) (20a6ebf61243b760dd65f897236b6ad3 Virustotal) instructs the infected host to download:
1) Remote File Injector "Symmi" (Win32) 7958f73daf4b84e3b00e008258ea2e7a Virustotal 
2) SDbot (Win32) - aaee52bfb589f6534c4b51e3b144dc08 Virustotal 
3) PHP scripts for injecting into compromised Wordpress sites. Among them a PHP spambot (victimized site owners often get alerted about copious amount of meds and spam porn emanating from their sites). This is also the source of varied links for spam using thousands of various links redirecting to the same sites (e.g. weightloss, work at home scams, or porn sites)

Read more at DeepEnd Research>>>

Download files (see below)