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Jelle Raaijmakers:
Dissecting a spammer’s spam script
Apr 19, 2016 @ 18:48:37

In this post to his site Jelle Raaijmakers dives into a script that's commonly injected into vulnerable sites and used by spammers to send messages without the knowledge of the site owner.

Let’s take a look at a PHP script used to send spam. These types of scripts run on servers all over the world and might give you some insight into a spammer’s dedication to annoy the hell out of you. Spammers abuse known flaws in unsecured websites and applications to break into a server and install scripts that are able to send loads of spam.

[...] Everyone running a mildly popular WordPress site knows that exploits can be really easily introduced by installing plugins from a less than reputable source – or by not keeping your plugins up to date. Sometimes, a zero-day exploit for a popular WordPress plugins becomes known and thousands of installations worldwide are infected at once.

He then goes through a script he found in an infected WordPress instance of his own on a shared hosting provider. He talks about what these kinds of scripts usually look like (an encoded eval injected into current scripts) and the process he followed to dissect it:

  • Step 1: determine method of obfuscation
  • Step 2: introduce newlines
  • Step 3: replace the $j10 values
  • Step 4: concatenate constant strings
  • Step 5: replace function invocations
  • Step 6: prettify the PHP code
  • Step 7: remove default $j10 argument
  • Step 8: decode the $pate payload
  • Step 9: replace $_POST references
  • Step 10: map function and variable names

It's not a super simple process, but in the end he's left with the complete PHP script that loads a remotely defined configuration, tries to send the emails and even retries if there's a failure. He includes a few noteworthy things about the script including STMP connection auto-detection and DNS lookups over UDP.

tagged: spammer script dissection reverse engineer email spam security

Link: https://jelleraaijmakers.nl/2016/04/dissecting-spammers-spam-script


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