SANS ISC: Sasfis Propagation

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Naming and tracking different malware families still leaves much to be desired, so for lack of a better alternative, I'm using the term Sasfis.  It's function appears to be a general bot-net and is mostly leveraged to install other malware such as key-logging/banking-trojans such as Zeus or scareware like the many variants of Fake Anti-virus that is currently in the wild.

I've been seeing this payload quite often this week.  The most common way I see it is in fake shipping invoices.  Today I received a well-targeted email using obviously-compromised user-contact data.  It claimed to be from the state business tax department, and encouraged the recipient to install the (fake) secure-gateway software so that they could continue to pay their sales taxes online.

I'm being intentionally vague about the state since I'm haven't been able to contact them (abuse@$STATE$.gov bounces, for shame) but needless to say, if your state is distributing security software to you, it shouldn't be hosted in Moldova.

The detection of the malware was low, only  3 out of 40 at virus total.  The host of the command and control server is also well aware of certain public sandboxes' IP addresses; their reports of network behavior were obviously blocked, and I managed to get one of my test IP addresses similarly blocked while playing around with the code today.  They're upping their game.

For those looking for this on their networks, look for HTTP-like activity out to v-medical.org and 89.187.53.203.