Iranian Nuclear Program Used As Lure in Flash-Based Targeted Attacks

A new targeted email attack is exploiting interest in the Iranian nuclear program to trick people into opening booby-trapped Word documents that exploit a known Flash Player vulnerability to install malware.

“There seems to be a new campaign underway using this new CVE-2012-0754 exploit,” said independent security researcher Mila Parkour in a blog post on Monday. The exploit is triggered when Flash Player tries to read a maliciously crafted MP4 file.

The rogue emails contain an attachment called “Iran’s Oil and Nuclear Situation.doc,” that has malicious Flash content embedded inside. When the Word document is opened, Flash Player tries to download and play a malformed MP4 file, which triggers a memory corruption and gives the exploit arbitrary code-execution ability on the machine.

The exploit is designed to drop and install a computer Trojan detected by some antivirus products as Graftor or Yayih.A, Parkour said. “If you are tracking APT [advanced persistent threats], you are likely to recognize this trojan.”

At the time of Parkour’s report, the malware had a low detection rate on VirusTotal, with only seven out of the 43 antivirus engines used by the service flagging it as malicious. The detection rate has increased to 21 out of 43 since then.

Advanced persistent threats were a hot topic at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco, with many industry experts discussing the dangers of targeted attacks that often result in the loss of intellectual property and trade secrets.

Unfortunately, these attacks still work because most organizations are slow when it comes to deploying software security updates. Adobe Systems has patched CVE-2012-0754 in Flash Player 11.1.102.62, which was released on Feb. 15, but attacks leveraging this vulnerability are still going on.

Adobe is currently working on adding sandbox support to Flash Player, a type of technology that will make it significantly harder to execute arbitrary code on systems even if a vulnerability like CVE-2012-0754 is exploited.

However, cybercriminals will probably start targeting other popular programs when that happens. A few years ago the most common exploits used in zero-day attacks were PDF-based, but now Flash Player is the primary target, said Secunia Chief Security Specialist Carsten Eiram at the RSA conference last Thursday.

The release of Adobe Reader 10, which is sandboxed by default, might have influenced this, but there are many other popular products out there. “Maybe Java will be next,” Eiram said.

The tense situation surrounding Iran’s nuclear program is a particularly important topic for people working in the defense industry. The fact that it was used as a lure in this attack could suggest that defense industry employees were among the potential targets.