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“The malware acts both as a Trojan (disguised as a Flash Player update) and dropper for additional payloads, most notably Adware,” Jerome Segura, head of Threat Intelligence with Malwarebytes, told Threatpost.
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Once clicked, the malicious ad infects the Mac user with the Shlayer trojan, which masquerades as a Flash upgrade and in turn redirects the victim to an adware installer.
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In the Mac campaign, a victim first comes across an ad harboring an image – however, in reality, JavaScript malware is hiding within the image-file code in the ad. The tactic has been used in several campaigns over the past year, including in uploaded images on trusted Google sites and even in memes on Twitter. 11, using ads on the web and steganography to spread steganography being the practice of concealing secret messages, code or information within otherwise innocuous-looking text or images. Researchers at Confiant and Malwarebytes said the attacks have been running since Jan. Such tools usually look for malware in text-based files such as HTML, PHP, JS, or other typical server files, but do not scan the metadata of images hosted or loaded on a site.A massive adware campaign has so far impacted up to a million Mac users, using a tricky steganography technique to hide malware in image files. Sinegubko says that malicious code hidden in images uploaded on Google sites outlives malware hosted on other public sites such as the malware uploaded on GitHub, Pastebin, Twitter, or other similar services.įurthermore, the researcher also draws a sign of alarm regarding security scans of image files, which are usually ignored by most web-based security scanners. "It’s hard to say where the images originate from, as their URLs are anonymized and have the same format."
It could be an image uploaded for a Blogger post, Google+ post, or even a public picture from Google Photos," the researcher added. "We don’t even know which user created it. The image here is not a part of some known public content." Researchers can't identify source of the malicious upload "Most of their tools require providing links to original posts, pages, or comments that contain the infringing content.
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"Google has many tools to remove content but it’s not obvious how to report malware in images," Sinegubko said. The biggest was that there was no simple way to report the malicious image to Google, which has forms set up for reporting copyright infringement, but not security issues. Hosting the images on the GoogleUserContent CDN was a unique approach, one that gave the Sucuri researcher quite a few headaches. What drew Sinegubko's attention to this case was not the trick of hiding malicious code inside an image's EXIF fields, but the use of the GoogleUserContent CDN to host these files.Ĭrooks have hidden malicious code in image metadata fields before, or in the image itself (a technique known as steganography). Issues with taking down the malicious image This web shell could then be used for defacing the server, and emailing the addresses of successfully exploited sites back to the attacker. The code contained in that field was a Base64-encoded string that when decoded multiple times would end up being a script that could upload a predefined web shell on the compromised server, along with various other files.
In a report published on Wednesday, Sinegubko says he found a malware operation focused on stealing PayPal security tokens (for bypassing PayPal authentication) where crooks were loading an image hosted on, extracting and then executing code found in its "UserComment" EXIF metadata field. The type of images that are being hosted on this domain are usually the photos uploaded on sites and the Google+ social network.ĭenis Sinegubko, a security researcher with web security firm Sucuri (now part of GoDaddy), has recently discovered one malware distribution campaign where the GoogleUserContent CDN was used to host one such malicious image. Hackers are hiding malicious code inside the metadata fields of images hosted on Google's official CDN (content delivery network).