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Kaspersky find a new zero day Flash flaw

by on30 April 2014



Flash… ahhhhh it will eat everyone of us

Kaspersky Labs have found a new zero day flash flaw after spotting two exploits in the wild. Kaspersky expert Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky said that the vulnerability is located in the Pixel Bender component, designed for video and image processing. The company received a sample of the first exploit on April 14, while a sample of the second came on April 16. The first exploit was initially recorded by KSN on April 9, when it was detected by a generic heuristic signature.

There were numerous subsequent detections on April 14 and 16. In other words, we succeeded in detecting a previously unknown threat using heuristics. The exploits were stored as movie.swf and include.swf at an infected site. The only difference between the two were their shellcodes. The second exploit (include.swf) wasn't detected using the same heuristic signature as the first, because it contained a unique shellcode. Each exploit comes as an unpacked flash video file. The Action Script code inside was neither obfuscated nor encrypted.

Zakorzhevsky was sure the software was designed to carry out malicious activity against a very specific group of users without attracting the attention of security solutions. Both the exploits detected by us spread from a site located at http://jpic.gov.sy.

The site was launched back in 2011 by the Syrian Ministry of Justice and was designed as an online form for citizens to complain about law and order violations. We believe the attack was designed to target Syrian dissidents complaining about the government.

The site was hacked in September 2013, something the alleged hacker announced on his twitter account. It's likely that the attack was carefully planned and that professionals of a pretty high caliber were behind it. The use of professionally written 0-day exploits that were used to infect a single resource testifies to this, Zakorzhevsky said.

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