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Do not get your New Year eCards with Waledac

Published: January 07 2009, 09:43 PM
by Zarestel Ferrer

If you prefer not to get a nasty surprise with your eCards, avoid Win32/Waledac, as this New Year the trojan is still alive and kicking, with new variants in-the-wild.

Last Christmas season Win32/Waledac was actively propagating via email and malicious websites. We already knew Win32/Waledac was being downloaded by Win32/Kollah variants from mirabellanews.com as an embedded, encrypted object in JPG files.

In addition to that, we also found the website shown below, distributing new samples of Win32/Waledac. We currently detect the new variants as Win32/Waledac.E, Win32/Waledac.F and Win32/Waledac.G.

Example of website distributing Win32/Waledac variants

Using Malzilla, we inspected the site and found out that it is made of one big image, waiting for you to click on it. Below, you can see a screen capture showing the source code behind the webpage. The source reveals that “img.gif” is linked to “card.exe”.

Example of source code showing the image linking to an executable

If you happen to execute it on your computer, one easily observable effect is that Waledac can make your system run sluggishly. The capture below depicts the trojan utilizing 100% CPU.

Example of Win32/Waledac causing an affected machine to run sluggishly

Once running, Win32/Waledac gathers emails addresses stored on your system and sends the information to one of its web servers:

Example of Win32/Waledac uploading stolen information to a remote server

Please watch out for these kinds of malicious websites and be careful what you are clicking on.

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By: Zarestel Ferrer
Zarestel Ferrer is a Senior Research Engineer with CA's Internet Security Business Unit (CA ISBU) based in Melbourne, Australia. Previous to CA, he worked as a software developer and then moved into security as a Senior Anti-virus Engineer at Trend Micro. He also worked for PC Tools Research as a...
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3 people have left comments:

While monitoring the domains used by Win32/Waledac recently, I noticed some changes. This time around

Posted by: CA Security Advisor Research Blog | May 4, 2009 4:01 AM

CA ISBU would like to remind everyone about online safety this holiday season. Here are the top ten you

Posted by: CA Security Advisor Research Blog | December 1, 2009 8:18 AM

 
 
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