Secure Your Facebook Account With SSL and Login Alerts

Recently Facebook has rolled out few new features that will enable the users to user their Facebook account with better sense of security. The newly introduced Secure Browsing feature allows users to always  use secure connection(https) for Facebooking. While facebook were already using secure connection for their login sessions, regular user activity was not protected.

Enabling Secure Browsing ensures that your data can't be seen by ISPs,your company Admins or other users. This is especially important in cases,where you are using Facebook from public computers or while surfing on an unencrypted wireless network.

To enable Secure Browsing functionality in your account go to Account -> Account Settings -> Account Security.
Check the option "Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible". From now onwards all your facebook conversations will be over https(you can verify this from the https:// prefix in the address bar).

 

There are a few things you should keep in mind before deciding to enable HTTPS. Encrypted pages take longer to load, so you may notice that Facebook is slower using HTTPS. In addition, some Facebook features, including many third-party applications, are not currently supported in HTTPS. We'll be working hard to resolve these remaining issues. We are rolling this out slowly over the next few weeks, but you will be able to turn this feature on in your Account Settings soon. We hope to offer HTTPS as a default whenever you are using Facebook sometime in the future.

Two more useful features are also available now, Login alerts and Activity viewer.
Login alerts will send you login notifications to your email or phone(if you have added a mobile device to your account) when a login occurs from an unknown computer.This will act as a early warning  in case somebody tries to access you account.
Activity monitor will let you check the recent activities happened in you account, how many logins happened in the recent past,how many sessions are still open.If you finds that there is any unauthorised activity in you account, there is an option to end that particular session also.

You can read the facebook blog post about new features here

Bom Sabado! Orkut Worm!!

Today I have been getting many scraps from friends (in Orkut!!!) with just the text "Bom Sabado!". Google translator tells me that it means "Good Saturday!", well seems like its going to be not so good Saturday for many!!.As time passes by more and more people seems to sends this scraps, indicating clearly that this is  some kind of a worm.
So I thought of digging into it a bit deeper, I created a dummy account so that my normal account will not be affected.Then added myself as friend in the dummy account, so that I can monitor it.Then I opened the scrap I got from the dummy account.While inspecting the source code, I found that the suspicion is true, it in needs is the work of a worm!!.I found following iframe  code injected along with the message into scrap.
This injected iframe loads "worm.js"  script from tptoolsorg which apparently causes all the problems.

Downloading the worm.js from the source and decoding it gives me following observations.

1.  It uses standard JS Objects and XMLHttpRequest to all sorts trouble.
2.  Code is obfuscated by using octal representation for objects and weird names  (eg: _0x7c2bx4) for variables. 
3. It does the following if you opens a scrap page.  

• Makes you join 5 communities.
• Sends Scraps to all your friends.

Following shows the part of the code that is responsible for the problems.

The main sign of infection is that, your browser will be hanged for a while if you open such a page.if you find it happens to you, close the browser immediately. It will prevent the worm from spreading.


Recovery Methods

1. Clean all the cookies and private data stored in the browser. 
2. Install Firefox and NoScript addon, it will block all the scripts. Allow only those you wanted. But be careful not to allow scripts from tptoolsorg.
3. Remove all those "Bom Sabado!" scraps from your Scrapbook.
4. Be careful not to visit any of the infected pages until Google fix this injection vulnerability.

FACEBOOK "Like" SCAMS

If you are a regular user of FB, there is a high chance that you must have seen something like this in your Newsfeed.

 The title will create such a curiosity in one's mind that, you will be forced to click on it. On clicking the link, you will be taken into a website with a "Like" button and with with texts asking you to click on the like button to proceed.

If you click on the Like button, it will be added to your likes and interests [ As per FB documentation, a page you Like will have capability to publish content to your News Feed whenever it pleases to, till you manually remove it ] Once you Liked the page, it will again ask you to share it with your friends as Step2 to view the "Amazing Content".

If you click the Share button, a popup window will come up asking you to Share the content with your friends.If you try to Skip it, an alert window will come saying unless you share this, you won't be able to see the content.

Driven by curiosity and unaware of the consequences, many people will actually share it!!, leading to further propagation of the scam. The result of all these so called "Steps" is that you will be presented with page asking you to perform "Human Verification" by completing a survey!!.Each time someone does a survey, the Scammer get money!! and free publicity, what an amazing marketing strategy!!.

How it is done?

By checking the source code of the page, it can be seen that Scammers are exploiting FB's own social plugin APIs!!.

They have added few Javascript of their own to detect using pressing 'Like' button, also to create an alert if the person refuses to Publish it to friends .

In this particular case, FB's own APIs are being used, and no password stealing code/malware download code has been found.But since 'liked' page has the capability to push content into the user, its very much possible to do worm/Trojan spreading using similar tactics.
Digging deep into the code, the final destination to which user will taken after Liking and Publishing is found.

If you visit this page directly, you will be treated with a page asking to complete the survey.If you act fast enough to hit the 'Escape' key as soon the page is getting loaded to stop the advertisement from getting loaded, you will be able to see the "Actual Amazing Content".

This just one of the hundreds if not thousands SCAMS that being propagated over FB, most of them uses the same tactics.If you have already fallen for one, go to Likes and Interests in your profile and remove the particular page.If you haven't , be careful not be a victim.Happy Facebooking!! :)

"rememberthistime" New Malware In the Wild

Today morning I got a mail from a friend of mine with the following content.

"I ran into some of your old friends the other day, they wanted me to

send you this."

The email contained an attachement named "rememberthistime.rar"
 

It seemed a legitimate mail in first glance, opening the rar file, I have found a an application seemed to be a screen saver named "rememberthistime.scr". Though it is highly possible that the friend would have compiled a screen saver with old photos, I have the policy of not opening executable file from emails, no matter what it claims to be, so didn't bother to open it.Soon he send another mail saying that,it is a virus.He accidentally opened the attachement, which made his firefox to crash.And later only realised that email has been send to all the contacts in his account.

Google search about the file confirmed the suspicion, with reports from many people saying that they had the same problem.It seems to be a new virus as it is not detected by many antivirus products. (See the report from Virustotal) only 17 out 41 product detects it.Especially Avast and AVG, commonly used free antivirus products couldn't detect it, which leads to the wide spread.

As of now I couldn't find much information about the behavior and removal of this particular malware.

I have done a quick analysis of the binary.For the exact details go through the links ( Anubis,ThreatExpert)

To summarize the findings

1. It creates a startup registry entry as well as following executable  are copied into Windows directory "services.exe" and "UNSTALVTB16.exe"

2. Following process were created by the it "errdlg.exe","SoundMan16.exe", SoundMan32.exe","services.exe"

Removal Instructions

1. If you have accidentally clicked on the file, immediately logg off from all the signed in accounts, as it seems the malware uses  signed in credentials to send mails to all your contacts like gmail,yahoo etc..

2.Open the task manager and end the above processes if exists.

3.Open regedit, find and delete the following entries "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{Y479C6D0-OTRW-U5GH-S1EE-E0AC10B4E666}", "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Application.exe","HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Application.exe\Application"

4.Delete the files "services.exe" and "UNSTALVTB16.exe" inthe Windows directory

5.Update the antivirus you currently uses and do a full system scan.

6.Its a good idea to install BitDefender/SpyBot S&D/Kaspersky and do a full system scan as it is known to detect and remove this malware.


Hope this will help someone to remove the malware in time before it does further damages.

[Update just now got the analysis from Joebox, upon execution the malware seems to produce an error like this]

Stay Safe Online: Strong and easy passwords

Passwords are the most critical part of security, it keeps everything from your emails,social networks  to your financial transactions, safe. No matter how secure the systems are, or how much money  was spend to buy the latest security software, you are totally vulnerable if the chosen password is your second name or date of birth.

Most difficult question is, how to make easy-yet strong passwords????.I have came across an interesting article in this topic, you can read it here.

My favorite method is to use a long phrase or a sentence  as password.For example "youwillneverhackmyaccount" will be a very strong password, very easy to remember also.

If you want to have separate passwords for different websites you can customize the phrase to suit it.For example "ihaveastrongpasswordfororkut" can be used for orkut and for facebook change the name to FB :)

To create passwords with numbers and alphabets, form a statement containing numbers.Example "mydobis28june2010".There is very little chance that, anyone will be able to guess this password even if he/she knows your DOB.

For even more security, you can include special characters also in the password. The key to remembering them is to apply the fact that, those characters  can be typed by pressing shift and pressing the corresponding number.You can remember "mycarsnumberis12#$" as 'mycarsnumberis12shift34'.

Hope this info help you to create a strong password next time you decide to have one.

Stay Safe on Gmail : Recovering from a password hack

Ever had the nightmare of someone hacking into your mail account?Losing all the contacts you had in a moment....unable to access important mails, or even worse someone is taking advantage financially?Well these are common scenarios theses days, with the increased number of malware infections,increased online presence and reused passwords.If you depending gmail as your main email address you may want follow some precautions to ensure that you can recover your account without much loss and in time, in the event of an incident.

Have a separate secondary email address ready: The first step in recovering your gmail(or google account in general ) password is through the secondary email id.  If the hacker haven't changed your secondary email address,then you can reset the password, hence regain access. If are not sure about your secondary email or haven't set it yet, go to google account settings.There select change password recovery option. Then set your secondary email, security question and update your phone number also. Its better to have a dedicated email account separately to be used as the secondary email for various services you use.Make a point to set a different password to this account, and also do not enable email forwarding.For added security,do not disclose this address to anyone or use it for any other purpose.

Try your luck with security question: If you lost access to your secondary email address or couldn't remember the id itself now, you can try password recovery using the security question you have set.But if the the hacker is smart, he will immediately change these details once he have access.So the only option left with you is to use the password recovery form and prove that you are the rightful owner of the account by entering few details.

Proving your ownership: If all the recovery methods specified above is failed, then the only option left is to prove to the google  that you are the rightful owner of that account.The recovery form can be found here.So take a sheet of paper and write down the following details( you can also use your mobile for easier access).Even if you can't find the exact details,get the closest data.

 Account Creation date:Go to the oldest emails in your Inbox.There will be a welcome email with the subject "Gmail is different. Here's what you need to know" from the Gmail Team upon creation of your account.If you have deleted that email,take the date from the first email you have received.

Orkut and blog creation date:Most likely you will be having these two enabled(if you don't have it,create it and note down the dates).For getting the approx creation date of orkut account, take the date of the first scrap you received.For blogger, go to your profile and note down "On blogger Since" date.

Also note down the account creation date for any two of the google services like analytics,adsense etc.[If you don't have any of these services activated, now is the time :) ]. For Analytics, look at the first date when it started collecting stats for your website(s). For AdSense, you may take the help of your AdSense account manager.(I don't know how to get the creation date for services other than these,if you have any idea kindly let me know, I uses these only.)

Noting down some more details like, most emailed contacts,custom labels created, email address of the person invited you to gmail may also help you in some cases.

Once you have recovered your account, reset your password,secondary email,phone and security question immediately. Also do check the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab in the settings page for any forwarding rules added.The hacker could have added a forwarding rule so that he will be able to read all your mails, even if he lost control of the account.You may also check the activity history by clicking the "Details" link at the bottom of the page.It will give you the IP address of the hacker, by which you can pinpoint(may not be possible always) the attacker.


But always prevention is better than cure, do take precautions while browsing on a public system,un-secure wireless connection.Be cautious about the links/files you get in mails etc.You can create a backup copy of your inbox locally using  an email client like Evolution/Outlook etc for better security.

[Update: Friend of mine suggested another idea for archiving, create a separate gmail account and add an email forward to this account from your normal mail.Also add send email as u r original email in this secondary email.So even if your email is compromised you will have all your mails and still will be able to send emails.  ]

Tabnabbing : All your tabs belongs to me!!

Ever heard of the word "tabnabbing"??? well I haven't until a few days back. Guess what, a new word to the  community and new method of attack to the bad guys!!. Its a new method of attack, that can be used for phishing, unveiled by Aza Raski, Creative Lead of Firefox, exploiting the weakest element in the chain Humans!!.

Well since the introduction of tabbed browsing, most of us surf the web with multiple tabs open, since its very convenient, and keep switching between them.You read news,chat with friends,update your FB status, all in different tabs. Here comes the problem, since all the tabs are open by us, we tends to trust them!!. Its not possible that the webpage in one tab might have changed while we are browsing in another right??.

Wrong!! as demonstrated by Aza, its possible for an attacker to detect that your viewing another tab and change the content of a particular tab to a phishing page.It happens relatively fast so that users won't normally see the page getting reloaded.

How Exactly the Hack Happens?
1. Someone is sending you a link to a web page say an article about present job market to your gmail id.
2.You open that page in a tab, which seems like a legitimate article.
3.After giving it a quick read, you navigate to another tab to check the cricket score.
4.Attacker's page detect that you have navigated away and haven't interacted to it for a while.It replaces the favicon icon with that of gmail's,the title with “Gmail: Email from Google”,  and change the page contents to look like the login page.
5.As the user scans through the open tabs, he/she will see the familiar looking Gmail favicon and title, without much doubt he/she will be ready to enter the username and password in the page thinking that it might have been automatically signed out, which is a normal situation.
6.The credentials goes to the attacker and you will be redirected back to gmail's page.

Well the attacker got what we wanted,and you have no clue!!.If the same password/username combination is re-used in a bank OR if the attack is performed with a bank's login page then the loss of the victim will be much more.

Still not convinced!!!??? See the video and you will understand.


[The video is taken from aza's original post which you can see here]

So How Do We Fix It?
The attack is based on human psychology,rather than any vulnerability in the software, which makes it difficult to prevent.Firefox is coming up with Firefox Account Manager which will protect users from these kind of attacks and makes logging into websites easier, at least they claim it that way.Another method is to use NoScript to block all the un-necessary scripts/flash/java in a webpage, which will block not only this attack but a bunch of others too.