Ramnit Worm gulps 45,000 Facebook passwords
05 January 2012
A bank account-raiding worm has started spreading on Facebook, stealing login credentials as it creeps across the site, security researchers have revealed.
Evidence recovered from a command-and-control server used to coordinate the evolving Ramnit worm confirms that the malware has already stolen 45,000 Facebook passwords and associated email addresses. Experts from Seculert, who found the controller node, have supplied Facebook with a list of all the stolen credentials found on the server. Most of the victims are from either the UK or France.
Ramnit differs from other worms, such as Koobface, that have used Facebook to spread because it relies on multiple infection techniques and has only recently extended onto social networks. Koobface, by contrast, only uses Facebook or Twitter to spread.
"Ramnit started as a file infector worm which steals FTP credentials and browser cookies, then added some financial-stealing capabilities, and now recently added Facebook worm capabilities," Aviv Raff, CTO at Seculert, told El Reg.
"We suspect that they use the Facebook logins to post on a victim's friends' wall links to malicious websites which download Ramnit," he added.
Ramnit first appeared in April 2010. By last July variants of the malware accounted for 17.3 per cent of all new malicious software infections, according to Symantec. A month later Trusteer reported that flavours of Ramnit were packing sophisticated banking login credential snaffling capabilities - technologies culled from the leak of the source code of the notorious ZeuS cybercrime toolkit at around the same time.
The new Ramnit configuration was able to bypass two-factor authentication and transaction-signing systems used by financial institutions to protect online banking sessions. The same technology might also be used to bypass two-factor authentication mechanisms in order to gain remote access to corporate networks, Seculert warns.
Invading Zuckerberg's Reservation
The move onto Facebook by the miscreants behind Ramnit seems designed primarily to expand the malware's distribution network and infect more victims.
"We suspect that the attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials to expand the malware’s reach," Seculert concludes, adding that capturing the login credentials of Facebook accounts creates a means to attack more sensitive accounts that happen to use the same email address and password combination.
"The cyber-criminals are also taking advantage of the fact that people usually use the same passwords for different web-based services (Facebook, Gmail, Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access, etc.) to gain remote access to corporate networks," it said.
The Ramnit outbreak on Facebook follows the November outbreak of an earlier worm that tried to infect victims with a variant of ZeuS. "More and more malware families start using social networks to reach victims instead of spam," Raff added.
Source: The Register
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