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McAfee Labs :

Real-World Social Engineering to Spread Malware Online

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 7:26am by Lokesh Kumar
Lokesh Kumar

An innovative social-engineering technique in which the virtual world meets the real world was described recently by SANS analyst Lenny Zeltser. The original post can be found here.

Apparently, yellow fliers were placed on vehicles in a parking lot, and the fliers claimed that the vehicles were in violation of parking regulations. The fliers further stateed that the owner could visit a certain website to get more information and pictures about the offense.

Upon visiting this website, the innocent victims were requested to download a toolbar [PictureSearchToolbar.exe], which claimed to let them search for more pictures of their vehicles. However, what this toolbar really does is download malicious files from the Internet; those files in turn downloaded more malware.

Here’s a screenshot of the website:

McAfee detects the original toolbar [PictureSearchToolbar.exe] as Vundo.dldr!1231E9AC from DAT Version 5516 onward, while the dropped and downloaded files are already detected as Vundo Trojan.

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Comments (2)

  • Brian Turner February 5, 2009 11:05AM

    It’s pretty scary to see virus attacks moving from online to offline – however, it’ll be interesting to see if existing surveillance technology will therefore make tracking down perpetrators easier. After all, harder to work with anonymous proxies and zombie machines in the offline world – unless, of course, these people are being recruited by supposed “work from home” internet business schemes. 2c.

    Reply
  • GovernmentSecurity.org February 4, 2009 8:54AM

    Highly effective yes. But can this method really be used to generate a large number of victims before it is shut down. The fact that it requires physical interaction which reduces the anonymity of the perpetrator is also going to reduce the number of times we see this happening.

    Perhaps a more effective and more profitable crime would be issuing fake parking tickets and then allowing people to pay them online at a reduced rate. Say $20. If people though they were saving $50 on a parking fine they will probably be less eager to question the ticket.

    Reply