Seeing how this is my first post to the Trend Micro malware blog, it is with some regret that it involves a renewed, year-end effort to increase the size of perhaps the most prolific botnet on the planet.
There appears to be two separate ongoing issues with malicious content and Blogger, the free Google blogging service.
The first one, which has been ongoing, but seemingly renewed with a vengeance, is the malicious nature of “fake” video which requires the user to install a new codec, and in turn, infects them with a ZLOB Trojan.
My colleagues over at Sunbelt Software blogged about this yesterday here.
However, in the past 24 hours, there seems to be hundreds of blogs which have appeared that now have singular links to a set of fast-flux servers that infects the user with the Storm Worm (a.k.a. NuWar — Trend Micro detects this as WORM_NUCRP.GEN). These “blogs” have nothing more than a reference to a “…Wishing You a Happy New Year…” or something similar, and a link to one of the server names which will infect the user with the Storm Worm.
Some of the “blogs” appear to be legitimate, some don’t — it’s hard to say. It’s also difficult to determine whether these are older blogs that haven’t been updated in a while (and somehow unauthorized access was gained to them), or perhaps bad guys just created a bunch of bogus blogs and planted this stuff, or what.
In any event, if you see any links like the ones in the partial screenshot above, don’t click on them.
And take a quick second or two to report them to Google as malicious.
Let’s have a safe & Happy New Year out there!
– Paul “Fergie” Ferguson, Advanced Threats Research
