Sasfis botnet variants are ramping up spam delivery

By SecurityAsia Editors | Aug 13, 2010

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Fortinet's July 2010 Threat Landscape report identified eight Sasfis botnet variants that took the top 10 malware list spot for this period. This is an increasingly common occurrence, as developers continue to roll out updated copies of their creations.

Earlier this year, the Sasfis botnet was dedicated to downloading and executing software (primarily fake antivirus) on infected systems. This period, Sasfis was observed downloading updated spamming modules. Typical Sasfis spam examples include fake UPS invoices and Facebook photo links.

“Spam bots continue to diversify, sending a variety of spam themes on a frequent basis,” said Derek Manky, project manager, cyber security and threat research, Fortinet.

“This month we observed various socially engineered emails that came with HTML attachments. These attachments further contained obfuscated javascript which would redirect users to malicious sites. The diversity of these spam campaigns and their targets shows how botnets continue to evolve to serve the needs of their underground customers.”

Stuxnet attack
This month’s Stuxnet attack, reiterates the importance of quickly patching security holes as fixes become available and having a broad intrusion prevention system (IPS) in place.

Even with proper patch management, all it takes is one zero-day vulnerability to be exploited (even in low volume) to potentially cause a significant impact.

While the Stuxnet attack is still under investigation, the fact that a trojan associated with the exploit was seemingly developed to target industrial control systems underscores this point.

This is also a good example of how little interaction is required by the end user to become infected. The Stuxnet exploit attacked a Windows Shell vulnerability (CVE-2010-2568). To launch its attack, a user simply opened a folder.

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