Hostfresh dead?

Sandi reports that Hostfresh has been de-peered, the latest organized criminal web host to be removed from the interwebs.

This Hong-Kong based outfit provided the back end hosting for malware infections including early versions of Conficker. It has been increasing apparent that they are basically an outpost of the Russian Business Network.

Hostfresh-hosted domains have scattered, but it probably won't be long until they find another RBN-friendly host that doesn't know what happened to Atrivo, McCole, Ukrtelegroup and Estdomains.

Classmates trojan: "Should I leave my Crazy Fat Wife for a younger woman?"

An unusual bit of social engineering here:

Subject: Classmates personal message: Please help me to decide which way to choose
From: "Gold - Classmates" online@groups.classmates.com

Special video report March 10, 2009
Message from your group member:

"Should I leave my Crazy Fat Wife for a younger woman? Please look video and Help me
to decide, please ........I need your help,
if possible - Write your opinion on the page wall"


Proceed to open full message text:

(removed)

Sincerely, Leslie Burks.
2009 Classmates Message Center.

If you click on the link (not advisable) you get the following page (hosted on a botnet somewhere):



You are then prompted to install and run a file called Adobemedia10.exe at which things will start to go seriously wrong.

The VirusTotal report indicates a very low detection rate for the binary (VBA32 flags it up as Embedded.Rootkit.Win32.Agent.ex). However, the ThreatExpert prognosis shows just how much damage this does, and identifies a C&C server at 58.65.232.17 which is a well-known malware server hosted by black hat hosting outfit Hostfresh.

This looks like a fairly horrible thing to try to clean up, and probably best to recover data, reformat and reinstall.