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Worm:W32/NetSky.V

Name : Worm:W32/NetSky.V
Category:Malware
Type:Worm
Platform:W32

Summary

A standalone malicious program which uses computer or network resources to make complete copies of itself. May include code or other malware to damage both the system and the network.

Disinfection

Special Disinfection Tool

F-Secure provides the special disinfection utility to eliminate Netsky.V worm infection. You can download this utility from our ftp site:

  •  ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/f-netsky.exe
  •  ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/f-netsky.zip

Disinfection instructions can be found here:

  •  ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/f-netsky.txt

System administrators who are using F-Secure Policy Manager, can distribute the tool as a JAR package automatically to all workstations. System administrators can download the JAR version from:

  •  ftp://ftp.europe.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/f-netsky.jar

Additional Details

Worm:W32/Netsky.V does not send itself as an e-mail attachment but uses HTML-encoded emails which exploit a vulnerability known as Microsoft Internet Explorer XML Page Object Type Validation Vulnerability (MS03-040) to try and download and execute itself to a vulnerable host computer.

Netsky.V also performs a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack against certain sites.

NetSky.V worm was discovered late night on April 14th, 2004. The binary code bears high resemblance to the latest NetSky variant, NetSky.U. Sharing up to approximately 86% of the code.

Some of the worm's text strings are scrambled.

Installation

The worm's file is a packed PE executable of length 19432 bytes. Upon execution, NetSky.V copies itself as EastAV.exe file to Windows folder and adds a startup key for this file into System Registry:

  •  [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
      "KasperskyAVEng" = "%WinDir%\KasperskyAVEng.exe"

where %WinDir% represents Windows folder name.


Propagation (E-mail)



Netsky.V arrives in infected emails but does not use an attachment. It sends HTML emails which exploit vulnerability known as Microsoft Internet Explorer XML Page Object Type Validation Vulnerability (MS03-040) that downloads a HTML page to the host.

This HTML page then uses another vulnerbility, Internet Explorer Object Data Remote Execution (MS03-032), that attempts to download the binary part of the worm using command line ftp client, and executes it.

Further information about these vulnerabilities, including a fix, is available from Microsoft:
  •  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms03-032.mspx
  •  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms03-040.mspx

The email harvesting functionality is identical to the variant NetSky.U.

The messages will have any of the following format:

  Subject: Mail Delivery Sytem failure
  Body: The processing of this message can take a few minutes...

  Subject: Mail delivery failed
  Body: Converting message. Please wait...

  Subject: Server Status failure
  Body: Please wait while loading failed message...

  Subject: Gateway Status failure
  Body: Please wait while converting the message...




Payload


Netsky.V has a payload. It performs a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on the following websites from 22nd to 29th of April 2004:

  •    www.cracks.am
  •    www.emule.de
  •    www.kazaa.com
  •    www.freemule.net
  •    www.keygen.us



Detection

Detection of NetSky.V was published on April 15th, 2004 in the following F-Secure Anti-Virus updates:

[FSAV_Database_Version]

Version=2004-04-15_02