Search Results: Myrtus and Guava

Over the last few days, Stuxnet has been covered extensively in the mass media. And it’s been covered differently by different sources. “Iran”, “Bushehr nuclear plant” and “cyber-weapon” are phrases which are already inexorably linked to Stuxnet.

Over the past few weeks the AV industry has continued to focus its research efforts on the Stuxnet worm. We blogged about what we found while we were investigating the malware; our Stuxnet series may have come to an end, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped our research.

So far in our series about Stuxnet we’ve focussed on the main issue: the threat posed by the zero-day vulnerability in the processing of LNK files, and the fact that cybercriminals have somehow got their hands on digital certificates. What we haven’t done in any detail is look at the worm’s functionality.

A few days ago we wrote about a new variant of the Stuxnet worm’s rootkit component, signed not with Realtek’s digital signature, but with one owned by JMicron. Costin posted about it in detail.

The geographical distribution of Stuxnet infections is just as interesting as the Trojan itself. We detect the rootkit component (the signed drivers) as Rootkit.Win32.Stuxnet, and the other files as Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Stuxnet.

Having finished episode 1 on a botanical note, let’s continue our trip into the undergrowth by taking a look at the Stuxnet Trojan’s digital signature.

Myrtus and Guava, Episode 1

We collected Stuxnet files for two years. After analyzing more than 2,000 of these files, we were able to identify the organizations that were the first victims of the worm’s different variants in 2009 and 2010. Perhaps an analysis of their activity can explain why they became “patients zero” (the original, or zero, victims).

Deep inside one of Stuxnet’s configuration blocks, a certain 8 bytes variable holds a number which, if read as a date, points to June 24th, 2012. This is actually the date when Stuxnet’s LNK replication sub-routines (https://securelist.com/myrtus-and-guava-episode-1/29614/) stop working and the worm stops infecting USB memory sticks.

This work-in-progress investigation tracks the Duqu Trojan and offers some answers to commonly asked questions.

Ever since Stuxnet hit the news last year, there has been an increased interest in the area of industrial control systems (ICS). This has been evidenced by the fact that we’ve seen a recent surge in public releases of zero-day (unpatched) vulnerabilities and exploits.

The third quarter of 2010 turned out to be more eventful than the preceding quarter. Over 600 million attempts to infect users’ computers with malicious and potentially unwanted programs were blocked during this period; an increase of 10% on the second quarter of this year.

In August, there was a significant increase in exploits of the CVE-2010-2568 vulnerability.

Microsoft released MS10-046 which deals with the LNK vulnerability originally exploited by Stuxnet.

The first Top Twenty list below shows malware, adware and potentially unwanted programs that were detected and neutralized by the on-access scanner when they were accessed for the first time