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September 30, 2010 - Fortinet® - a leading network security provider and a worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions - today announced its September 2010 Threat Landscape report, which showed a new vulnerability that is being used to exploit Jailbroken Apple iPhones leveraging the PDF file format. Jailbreaking is typically done to circumvent digital rights management (DRM) in order to make the phone open to a greater number of applications.

"Once an iPhone, or any device, has been ‘broken,' the door is open. The device may then execute code or function in a way it was not designed to do," said Derek Manky, project manager, cyber security and threat research, Fortinet. "In the case of malware attacks, the Ikee worm did precisely this last year: it relied on Jailbroken iPhones to gain unauthorized entry via SSH. Jailbroken devices can also run malicious applications, so it is plausible that a two-stage malware attack could occur."

QuickTime, Outlook and Acrobat Vulnerabilities Plugged

* Two vulnerabilities were patched for Apple QuickTime on September 15, one of which was discovered by FortiGuard Labs (FGA-2010-46). The other vulnerability (CVE-2010-1818) was a critical issue that bypassed Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) protection technologies using QuickTime. Fortinet research has determined that there are in-the-wild flash samples actively trying to exploit this vulnerability. Patches can be downloaded here.

* Microsoft has issued security advisories for the Outlook Web Access Privilege Elevation Vulnerability and ASP.NET, which could allow information disclosure.

* Adobe has issued two zero-day security advisories for Adobe Reader/Acrobat and its Flash player.

Botnets Still Hot on the Malware Scene

On September 14, FortiGuard Labs detected a surge in Sasfis activity that was linked to the Asprox spambot. While Asprox has been around for some time, it has been silent for more than a year. The Asprox module that was dissected was intended to be used for an email seeding campaign. The emails contained zipped executable attachments, disguised as fax copies. The attachment was a copy of Sasfis, which would download Asprox in order to send more spam on the freshly infected machine.

In addition to an increase in Sasfis activity, the FortiGuard Center downloaded a sniffer module that scans traffic on TCP ports 21, 25 and 110 (FTP, SMTP and POP3).

"Traffic on these ports would be processed by the module into encrypted data sets and sent via HTTP POST to a command and control server located in Europe," Manky continued. "Stolen FTP credentials can be quite valuable and are often used to hijack Web servers. The variant was also observed downloading the TotalSecurity ransomware suite, which has been high on our malware radar for a number of weeks."

FortiGuard Labs compiled threat statistics and trends for September based on data collected from FortiGate® network security appliances and intelligence systems in production worldwide. Customers who use Fortinet’s FortiGuard Subscription Services should already be protected against the threats outlined in this report.

FortiGuard Subscription Services offer broad security solutions including antivirus, intrusion prevention, Web content filtering and anti-spam capabilities. These services help protect against threats on both application and network layers. FortiGuard Services are updated by FortiGuard Labs, which enables Fortinet to deliver a combination of multi-layered security intelligence and zero-day protection from new and emerging threats. For customers with a subscription to FortiGuard, these updates are delivered to all FortiGate, FortiMail™ and FortiClient™ products.