HDD Tools & Other Malware Removal

Recently I had someone come to me with their laptop saying that they had a new anti-virus program that they didn't remember installing and that 'other things' on their laptop didn't seem to work any more. The same thing happened to a corporate desktop machine I was asked about a couple of weeks later, that was originally running McAfee. Finally, two days ago I saw another corporate machine running McAfee that was saying that it had a hard drive failure. A tool, called HDD Tools, then automatically ran to diagnose the problem and stated that if they purchased the full HDD Tools product then it could fix the problem.

Each of these was a piece of malware that had infected the machine and was trying to get the user to enter their credit card details into a website so that money can be taken from their account and maybe their card cloned. These malware programs go along with the fake anti-virus software that the APWG have reported a huge rise in recently. These are a collection of programs that purport to be useful software and will fix a problem that you are experiencing. The truth of the matter is that it is that software that is causing you the problems in the first place and paying them the money will just cause more trouble.

The later breed of scams using these supposedly useful tools do one of two things in general - either they cost you money and they may try to clone your card, or they will enlist your machine in a botnet. For a discussion of this type of malware and its proliferation, see this blog post.

Here I wanted to tell you a couple if simple steps to remove this type of software if you do get infected. Obviously, it should go without saying that you should do everything possible to try to avoid getting infected in the first place rather than try to recover from it - the damage may already be done. However, there are many similarities between them and you will need to remove them. A simple procedure can often work to get rid if them as follows (N.B. this will not always work and if you make a mistake you can make things much worse).

1. Detect that you have rogue software (malware) on your system. This isn't always hard as, in the case of HDD Tools, it will keep popping its window up and not allow you access to the C:\ drive of your computer. Other things to look for are if your AV product doesn't work or if you get strange services appearing in the Task Manager. Often the malware will stop Task Manager from running by disabling the Run command and the right-click functionality on the Taskbar. However, sometimes you can still get access to it by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Look for processes with random names; HDD Tools uses a number like 20418112.exe, that will change with each infected machine.
2. Reboot your machine in Safe Mode by pressing F8 during boot (that's the function key F8, NOT press the F key then the 8 key). If your machine boots up normally then you didn't press F8 early enough - you need to reboot again. You need to go into Safe Mode as the malware will prevent you from deleting it normally by having a background service running. This will not be started in Safe Mode, so you can remove it.
3. Once in Safe Mode, you can begin to remove the malware. First, you need to find out what the malware is and where it's stored. Mostly the malware won't appear in the list of installed programs so can't simply be uninstalled, but that's worth a check. However, sometimes this can be used to reinfect the machine, so be wary. If you have rogue software on your system then it will probably have created some kind of shortcut on the desktop or in the Start menu to make it seem legitimate. Have a look at where this points to and what the name of the file is. Other places to look are in the Startup folder and in the list of services installed on the machine. In the case of HDD Tools, it installs a desktop icon and Start menu folder.
4. Navigate to the path in Windows Explorer to find all the files you are looking to remove, but don't remove them yet. HDD Tools stores its files in your temporary folder, e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\username\AppData\Local Settings\temp, or C:\users\username\AppData\Local\temp. You may need to show hidden files and folders to be able to see this folder in Windows Explorer by changing the settings in Folder Options.
5. Run a file search on your machine to see if there are any other instances of those files anywhere else for you to remove.
6. Run Regedit from the Run... command to open up the registry editor (Warning: messing around with the registry can ruin your machine). Now run a search for the filename in the registry.
7. You will need to go through the registry to remove all references to the malware and any keys that it has created. In general, if the only entries in the key relate to the malware you can remove the key, otherwise just remove the values. These often appear in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT _USER in the Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion key.
8. Once you have deleted these, you can go back and delete the original files.
9. Reboot normally and check your machine.

It is still possible to get infected even if you have a properly managed device with Anti-virus software installed. The problem is that they are not 100% effective. See 'How secure is your AV Product?'

APWG Report 1st Half 2009

On 27th September the APWG released their First Half 2009 Phishing Trends Report. This provides some interesting/worrying reading. Most notably is the rise and rise of rogue anti-malware programs.

Rogue anti-malware programs are programs that run on a user's machine and falsely identify malware infections. They then inform users that the malware can be removed by purchasing their anti-malware program. The installed software, in many cases, does absolutely nothing. The malware author has made their money off the user and doesn't care about them or the fact that their machine is left vulnerable to other malware. However, there is another breed of rogue anti-malware that will install other malware onto the user's machine, often adding them to botnets or adding trojans and spyware. According to Panda Labs' Luis Corrons, rogue anti-malware programs are proliferating with "exponential growth. In the first quarter of 2009 alone, more new strains were created than in all of 2008. The second quarter painted an even bleaker picture, with the emergence of four times as many samples as in all of 2008."

Most of these rogue anti-malware programs have a common root - they even look the same. So how come they aren't detected as malware? Well, often they employ server-side obfuscation so that each version is slightly different, thus defeating some signature-based scans. Also, you have to remember that many of these don't perform any malicious actions and, therefore, don't trigger other alarms.

What can we do about rogue anti-malware? Well, simply don't trust anything on the Web saying that you are infected or that they will scan you for free. Do not install any anti-malware from a company that you do not know and always check for validity of links and downloads. There are many companies out there providing free basic anti-malware or sophisticated products for a relatively low price that are legitimate, such as: Panda Security, AVG, Comodo, Symantec, etc. If you do get infected by one of these programs then you need to remove it. Instructions for removing the most common ones can be found at http://www.anti-malware-blog.com/ - N.B. be warned that I have not assessed or validated their instructions and there is no guarantee that they won't cause other problems.

What about the rest of the report? Well, phishing is still on the increase, with reported phishing highs for the first half of the year exceeding those of last year significantly (about 7%). 21,856,361 computers were scanned to determine host infection rates. 11,937,944 were found to be infected (54%), which is an increase of over 66% from the last quarter of 2008. Banking trojan/password stealing crimeware infections rose by more than 186%. Finally, payment services have taken the top spot in the most targeted industry sector from the financial sector, although this is still a close second. To see how this compares, a previous blog post of mine on this shows how things have changed.

For more information about the Anti-Phishing Working Group, to report phishing attacks or to see their reports yourself, visit http://apwg.org/

APWG Report 2nd Half 2008

The Anti-Phishing Working Group produce two reports a year now on Phishing Activity Trends. I was reminded to look at the report from the second half of last year recently by problems encountered by an organisation I'm involved with(!), which has suffered two successful phishing attacks in the last 9 months. The two incidents both followed the same pattern: a phishing email was sent round purporting to be from the technical staff talking of lack of storage space on the user's account. They asked for the user's password in order to be able to reconfigure the quota. Now, the vast majority of people deleted this email, but on each occasion one person (a different one in each incident) replied with their username and password. This resulted in vast amounts of spam being sent through the users' email accounts, sufficient for the domain to be blacklisted by Message Labs in the first incident. The problem is that people still fall for this type of scam, and it only needs one person in an organisation to do it.

Anyway, back to the report. The APWG highlight a few interesting things in their report. Phishing reports and unique phishing sites detected both peaked in October, at 34,758 and 27,739 respectively, then fell sharply to December, when the figures were 23,187 and 15,709 respectively. These are way off the high of 55,643 detected in April 2007 and the lowest since August 2006, when they fell to 10,091. This is in sharp contrast to the password stealing malicious code URLs, which soared to 31,173 in December from 11,834 in November and a low of 3,113 in May last year. Although, interestingly, the number of unique keyloggers and malicious applications has dropped from 1,519 in July to 559 in December.




This trend has been followed by a new category of 'Rogue Anti-Malware Programs.' This is where fake applications are sold, purporting to be anti-malware (e.g. AV products) but either do little or nothing but make money off people buying it, or they become harvesters of information. The rise is from a low of 2,084 in September to 9,287 in December.



The final thing to note concerns Brand Hijacking. Brand hijacking is still high, with 269 brands hijacked in November, but the balance in the sectors is changing. Back in 2007 Financial Services accounted for 93.8% of the hijacked brands, which peaked at a high of 178 in November 2007. The remainder were: Retail 2.8%, ISP 2.2% and Government 1.2%. In Q3 2008 Financial had dropped to 61% and dropped further in Q4 2008 to only 46%. This shows a drop in real terms as well as percentage as around 124 financial brands were hijacked in Q4 2008 against around 167 in 2007. Retail has shown a drop from around 5 brands to around 3 and makes up for only 1% in Q4 2008. The 'big winner', if it can be described thus, is Payment Services, which is up to 38%, with Auction sites making up 11% and 4% for other brands. This 'other' category is up from 3% in Q3 2008, which is attributed to more attacks against MySpace, Facebook, etc., by the authors.

For more information about the Anti-Phishing Working Group, to report phishing attacks or to see their reports yourself, visit http://apwg.org/