INTEGO SECURITY ALERT - October 31, 2007
OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan Horse Changes Local DNS Settings to
Redirect to Malicious DNS Servers
Exploit: OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan Horse
Discovered: October 30, 2007
Risk: Critical
Description: A malicious Trojan Horse has been found on several pornography
web sites, claiming to install a video codec necessary to view free
pornographic videos on Macs. A great deal of spam has been posted to many
Mac forums, in an attempt to lead users to these sites. When the users
arrive on one of the web sites, they see still photos from reputed porn
videos, and if they click on the stills, thinking they can view the videos,
they arrive on a web page that says the following:
Quicktime Player is unable to play movie file. Please click here to
download new version of codec.
After the page loads, a disk image (.dmg) file automatically downloads to
the user's Mac. If the user has checked Open "Safe" Files After Downloading
in Safari's General preferences (or similar settings in other browsers),
the disk image will mount, and the installer package it contains will
launch Installer. If not, and the user wishes to install this codec, they
double-click the disk image to mount it, then double-click the package
file, named install.pkg.
If the user then proceeds with installation, the Trojan horse installs;
installation requires an administrator's password, which grants the Trojan
horse full root privileges. No video codec is installed, and if the user
returns to the web site, they will simply come to the same page and receive
a new download.
This Trojan horse, a form of DNSChanger, uses a sophisticated method, via
the scutil command, to change the Mac's DNS server (the server that is used
to look up the correspondences between domain names and IP addresses for
web sites and other Internet services). When this new, malicious, DNS
server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing
web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks), or simply to web
pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites. In the first case,
users may think they are on legitimate sites and enter a user name and
password, a credit card, or an account number, which will then be hijacked.
In the latter case, it seems that this is being done solely to generate ad
revenue.
Under Mac OS X 10.4, there is no way to see the changed DNS server in the
operating system's GUI. Under Mac OS X 10.5, this can be seen in the
Advanced Network preferences; the added DNS servers are dimmed, and cannot
be removed manually. (Intego is currently testing previous versions of Mac
OS X; it is likely that they can be infected as well, since all versions of
Mac OS X have the scutil command.)
The Trojan horse also installs a root crontab which checks every minute to
ensure that its DNS server is still active. Since changing a network
location could change the DNS server, this cron job ensures that, in such a
case, the malicious DNS server remains the active server.
This Trojan horse also provides different versions of itself, perhaps
according to the country in which the user is located to provide
country-specific spoofing. Repeated downloads of the disk image show that
there are several different versions.
Means of protection:
The best way to protect against this exploit is to run Intego VirusBarrier
X4 with its virus definitions dated October 31, 2007. Intego VirusBarrier
X4 eradicates the malicious code and prevents the Trojan horse from being
installed. Intego recommends that users never download and install software
from untrusted sources or questionable web sites.
