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Keldrin writes:
"Zeus is a trojan designed to steal banking credentials, and has been declared one of the most successful pieces of malware currently seen in the wild. A new variant is making detection far more difficult for anti-virus companies by hiding configuration settings inside pictures. At the moment, the malware simply encodes the configuration with Base64, passes them through XOR and RC4, then attaches them to the end of an image file. This makes for an 'infected' file that is much larger than the original. There is speculation that future releases of the malware will be able to detect minuscule changes to the colors of individual pixels, making the affected files much harder to detect."
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New Zeus Trojan Variant Using Steganography
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(Score: 1) by DeathMonkey on Friday February 21 2014, @07:24PM
This seems like an improbable attack vector, as the malware would need to store the original image somewhere, or the original pixel values, in order to compare the changes that were made.
I don't think this is true. It sounds like they are appending the malicous data to the end of the file. So they can retreive it either by knowing how large the original file is. Or, if the image format has some sort of end-of-image-data code then they can parse anyting after that.
As other posters have noted this is a fairly weak version of steganography. The evolution of this technique should be interesting...
(Score: 1) by SMI on Friday February 21 2014, @07:45PM
Just wanted to point out that if the config file appended to the image was of a static size, i.e. with neutral values in place of unconfigured options, then that should also be all they needed to know (in terms of size).