We were alerted to a spam run that banked on the craze surrounding the highly anticipated worldwide release (except in Japan) of Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) on 29 April 2008.

Below is a screenshot of the sample spammed email message:

It appears to be offering a free PlayStation 3 along with a copy of GTA IV. And the ironic (or appropriate?) come-on: “Enter the Criminal Underworld.” Clicking on the link leads the user to the following site:

Given the immense popularity of this online game, its reception by the online gaming community is no longer just hype. The days before the release provided great opportunities for spammers to trick online users into clicking the links in the spammed email messages. Users who did so were asked to provide their email addresses — instead of the supposed free version of GTA IV, affected users received more spam. This is a common technique used by spammers to check whether the email accounts they have gathered are indeed active. Users who click on links are therefore unwittingly signaling spammers that their email addresses are indeed working accounts.

Fans — in the millions no doubt — proved to be most vulnerable to this spamming operation. And who says “no” to the doubly irresistible promise of being able to play the game before everyone else — and for free, too!

Interestingly, last year’s release of another famous online game, Halo 3, was relatively quiet when it came to online security issues. Both of these games were heavily promoted and marketed, which doesn’t explain why we see the spamming just now. Maybe last year’s media-documented campaign by a Florida lawyer against the game creators makes the game controversial enough to warrant spammers’ time and attention.

As usual, users are advised to refrain from clicking on links regardless of how attractive the offers are.

Thanks to Trina Baetiong of Content Security for details regarding this spam run.

Last month started with an April Fool’s message being spammed around. The spammed email contained a link from where a variant of the Storm malware could be downloaded. Aside from that, we’ve had our usual fill of Trojans and malicious scripts that plagued compromised Web sites for April.

Notable Malware

TROJ_AGENT.AMAL
This Trojan poses as a browser plugin that must be installed first to view files that are supposed to come from a fake US federal judiciary Web site. Reported last April 15, the link to the fake site comes from spammed email messages claiming to be legitimate court subpoenas. To add credibility to the spammed email, the sender uses a uscourts.com email address, which may seem authentic to unsuspecting recipients of the message.

TROJ_SPAMBOT.AF
TROJ_SPAMBOT.AF is the Trend Micro detection for the malware behind Kraken, which is an emerging botnet rivaling the Storm botnet. Some researchers who have analyzed Kraken have stated that this may be a variant of the Bobax malware family.

TROJ_AGENT.AZZZ
Reported last April 5, this Trojan uses an old technique to trick users into compromising their systems. Users receive a spammed email, under the guise of a Microsoft security bulletin, urging the users to download a patch from a certain link present in the email. Of course, the patch is actually the malware itself, which Trend Micro detects as TROJ_AGENT.AZZZ.

WORM_NUWAR.JQ
TrendLabs researchers discovered a Web site that offers what looks like a YouTube-style streaming video service. The infection vector and messaging are actually still the same — that is, users are most likely to access this site via links on specially crafted blogs. What is interesting this time is that on the suspect site, users are required to download the so-called “Storm Codec” in order to view the video. Yes, you read that right: the codec is called Storm Codec. Of course, the “codec” is actually a NUWAR variant, which Trend Micro already detects as WORM_NUWAR.JQ since April 2.

Exploits and Vulnerabilities

BKDR_POISONIV.QI and EXPL_NEVAR.B
A backdoor exploiting a recent vulnerability in Microsoft’s GDI processing was discovered right after Patch Tuesday last April 8. A file named TOP.JPG has been found to do this. It arrives on a system as an executable, now detected as EXPL_NEVAR.B. With just this opening available to malware authors, they can do pretty much anything after exploiting this vulnerability. Its specific routine is to connect to a URL to download a file named WORD.GIF (also detected as BKDR_POISONIV.QI).

Web Incidents

JS_DLOADER.TVP and JS_IFRAME.US
Early this month, several Web sites have been compromised by search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning. Some of the compromised sites were that of the Washington State University and several news sites such as Sun Gazette and Tribune-Chronicle. For the past few months, education Web sites (*.edu) were the ones targeted for such attacks, averaging about three per month. In this recent incident, JS_IFRAME.US is the iFrame component that is inserted into the HTML code of the Web page. When the browser is redirected by this malicious iFrame, it downloads the malicious script file JS_DLOADER.TVP.

That’s it for today. As of this writing, it seems that another Italian Job is underway, with ~100 compromised Web sites. We shall take a look at more of this in next month’s malware roundup.