As an outsource security partner BAI provides managed security, managed firewall, managed ids, content filtering, internet security, network security, penetration testing, and vulnerability testing.

A new round of greeting card spam that draws users to attack sites relies on a sophisticated multi-pronged, multi-exploit strike force to infect machines according to security professionals.

Captured samples of the spam have all borne the same subject line - "You've received a postcard from a family member!"-- and contain links to a malicious website, where JavaScript determines whether the victim's browser has scripting enabled or turned off.
"If JavaScript is disabled, then they provide you a handy link to click on to exploit yourself," said a SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) alert. Some users turn off scripting because it is a frequent attack vector; browsers with JavaScript enabled are simply fed a two-part package of downloader and malware.

The quick browser status exam in this attack is somewhat similar to one used in a different exploit, but the two are not connected. They're using two different toolkits, but they're both prime examples that exploits against browsers are more and more prevalent.

 Thursday's greeting card gambit tries a trio of exploits, moving on to the second if the machine is not vulnerable to the first, then on to the third if necessary. The first is an exploit against a QuickTime vulnerability, the second an attack on the popular WinZip compression utility and the third, dubbed "the Hail Mary" by ISC, is an exploit for the WebViewFolderIcon vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft patched last October.

ISC said several anti-virus vendors had tentatively pegged the executable malware - the file offered to users whose browsers have JavaScript disabled - as a variation of the Storm Trojan, an aggressive piece of malware that has been hijacking computers to serve as attacker bots since early this year. According to ISC's warning, computers already compromised by Storm - aka Peacom - are hosting the malware, and the attackers are rotating those machines' IP addresses in the spam they're sending.

"Every Storm-infected system is potentially capable of hosting the malware and sending the spam, but only a few will be used in any given run," said the alert, "depending on how many emails they want sent and how many web hits they're expecting."

Hackers haven't abandoned the practice of attaching malware to email, then counting on naive users to open the file. But malware hosting sites are the trend. It's much more difficult to send a full malicious file, because of users' learned reluctance to open suspicious files and filtering and blocking tactics by security software.

This is widespread, and leads the user to multiple IP addresses.  "There's not a single server, there are multiple exploits [and the email] has no attachments. This will be very difficult to detect."

 Recently a similar website-hosted attack was captured that had an arsenal of multiple exploits at its disposal. That attack, however, featured an unusual, if rudimentary, browser detector that sniffed out whether the target computer is running IE or Firefox. If the attack detects IE, it feeds the machine a Windows animated cursor exploit. If it finds Firefox, however, the sites spits out a QuickTime exploit.