W32/Yaha-E Worm

[Paul Wilders]

Name: W32/Yaha-E
Type: Win32 worm
Date: 20 June 2002

Sophos has received several reports of this worm from the wild.

Description:

W32/Yaha-E is a worm which spreads via email. The worm has its own SMTP client software and uses either an SMTP server found by examining the Windows registry or one from a list contained within the worm itself.

The email sent by the worm is highly variable. The subject line of the email is created using a combination of words and phrases from the following list:

searching for true Love
you care ur friend
Who is ur Best Friend
make ur friend happy
True Love
Dont wait for long time
Free Screen saver
Friendship Screen saver
Looking for Friendship
Need a friend?
Find a good friend
Best Friends
I am For u
Life for enjoyment
Nothink to worryy
Ur My Best Friend
Say 'I Like You' To ur friend
Easy Way to revel ur love
Wowwwwwwwwwww check it
Send This to everybody u like
Enjoy Romantic life
Let's Dance and forget pains
war Againest Loneliness
How sweet this Screen saver
Let's Laugh
One Way to Love
Learn How To Love
Are you looking for Love
love speaks from the heart
Enjoy friendship
Shake it baby
Shake ur friends
One Hackers Love
Origin of Friendship
The world of lovers
The world of Friendship
Check ur friends Circle
Friendship
how are you
U r the person?
Hi
U realy Want this
Romantic
humour
New
Wonderfool
excite
Cool
charming
Idiot
Nice
Bullsh*t
One
Funny
Great
LoveGangs
Shaking
powful
Joke
Interesting
Interesting
Screensaver
Friendship
Love
relations
stuff
to ur friends
to ur lovers
for you
to see
to check
to watch
to enjoy
to share

The message text begins:

"Hi
Check the Attachment ..
See u"

or

"Attached one Gift for u.."

or

"wOW CHECK THIS"

The remainder of the message will resemble a forwarded email.
The From and Subject fields of the forwarded message are also variable but the message will always contain the text:

"This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. If you need to
unsubscribe, follow the instructions at the bottom of the message.
***********************************************

Enjoy this friendship Screen Saver and Check ur friends
circle...

Send this screensaver from <web address> to everyone you consider a FRIEND, even if it means sending it back to the person who sent it to you. If it comes back to you, then you'll know you have a circle of friends.

* To remove yourself from this mailing list, point your browser to:
<web address>
* Enter your email address (<sender's address>) in the field
provided and click "Unsubscribe".

OR...

* Reply to this message with the word "REMOVE" in the subject line.

This message was sent to address <sender's address>
X-PMG-Recipient: <sender's address>
<<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>>
<<<>>>"

The attachment filename is made up of three parts- a name and two extensions.

The name is chosen from:

screensaver
screensaver4u
screensaver4u
screensaverforu
freescreensaver
love
lovers
lovescr
loverscreensaver
loversgang
loveshore
love4u
lovers
enjoylove
sharelove
shareit
checkfriends
urfriend
friendscircle
friendship
friends
friendscr
friends
friends4u
friendship4u
friendshipbird
friendshipforu
friendsworld
werfriends
passion
bullsh*tscr
shakeit
shakescr
shakinglove
shakingfriendship
passionup
rishtha
greetings
lovegreetings
friendsgreetings
friendsearch
lovefinder
truefriends
truelovers
f*cker
loveletter
resume
biodata
dailyreport
mountan
goldfish
weeklyreport
report
love

The first extension is chosen from:

doc
mp3
xls
wav
txt
jpg
gif
dat
bmp
htm
mpg
mdb
zip

The second extension is chosen from:

pif
bat
scr

The worm also creates a copy of itself in the Recycle folder
with a name comprised of four random lower case characters. The path to this copy is then added to the following registry entry to ensure that the worm is run each time a program with an EXE extension is run:

HKLM\exefile\shell\open\command\default

Two files are created in the Windows folder. One has a DLL
extension and an eight character name created from the same four characters used for the copy of the worm. This file contains a list of email addresses found on the infected computer. The second file has the same name as the copy of the worm and a TXT extension. This is a simple text file containing the text "iNDian sNakes pResents yAha.E".

The worm will attempt to disable security software by
terminating any of the following processes:

SCAM32
SIRC32
ZONEALARM
LOCKDOWN2000
AVP.EXE
CFINET32
CFINET
SAFEWEB
WEBSCANX
ANTIVIR
MCAFEE
NORTON
FP-WIN
IOMON98
PCCWIN98
F-PROT95
F-STOPW
PVIEW95
NAVWNT
NAVRUNR
NAVLU32
NAVAPSVC
SYMPROXYSVC
RESCUE32
NISSERV
ATRACK
IAMAPP
LUCOMSERV
NAVW32
NAVAPW32
VSSTAT
VSHWIN32
AVSYNMGR
AVCONSOL
WEBTRAP
POP3TRAP
PCCMAIN
PCCIOMON

When the worm is first run it will imitate a screen saver by
repeatedly displaying the following messages on the screen in various colours:

U r so cute today "!"!
True Love never ends
I like U very much!!!
U r My Best Friend

A copy of the attachment in base64 encoded format is created in the folder C:\Windows\Temp with the filename kitkat.

Read the analysis at
www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32yahae.html

[Paul Wilders]

SOFTWIN has released a free detector/cleaner in the meanwhile (not tested by us):

www.bitdefender.com/html/free_tools.php

(first one on top).

regards.

paul

[UNICRON]

Sounds like this guy made a career out of this worm lol. Very feature rich!

I didn't see NOD32, TDS3, Wormguard or KERIO/TINY on the list. I guess the author will have to go back to the drawing board before he can play with the big boys.

[Jooske]

Just this morning in the news saw one of the dutch ISPs (www.zeelandnet.nl) closes their outgoing emails because of this infection. People can get their account unlocked after kind of "all cleaned" certificate, which people can get via the scanning with the av product they affiliated with, RAV
(i must admit i never heard from them before) ( http://www.ravantivirus.com/ )
Anyway, their online scan told me they could not function as i would not have administrative rights on my pc (! on a win98 system?? with me logged in as user myself?), they could not load activeX components (!! they had downloaded with my permission some tool, and after that message i even put them in my trusted zone and for a few moments even lowered all possible security which i put all back on high after and deleting them from my trusted zone of course!). So i don't know if i ever should give their products any try at all whenever in future with such bad detections on systems!

Speaking about good money, think this ISP is trying to make good money from the Yaha which is hardly a real problem this moment, as the detection is added to all main av/at software.
Strangely enough they didn't give a kick with Klez, which i think is far more a problem.......

Hi Jooske,

Here are for example two Dutch sites about it:

http://www.webwereld.nl/nieuws/11576.phtml

http://www.virusalert.nl/?show=nieuw...657319f0043663

[Jooske]

Thanks Jan, read there the Yaha is more in the Netherlands then anywhere else. Are we dutch all that stupid or just curious to open any email, or don't we update, not patch, asnd are just ignorant? Saw in one of the comments a girl thinking av is getting a thing to have by now (!!!); i would say persons without scanners should not be allowed on internet at all!

Anyway, in the meantime the RAV hurried withy their tech repair and i am trying for the third time now to have my online scan; crashed several times, but unsure if that was again IE 6.0 crashing (it does frequently) so there is doubt, till now each time took many hours per drive, and still not finished so could start all over after each crash;
most nasties in my test zoo are found, some more alarms i like to look at outside that, but even i can't make up what and where with incomplete path and file names, with more the nasties name.... and i make up in one of the email folders is an iframe-exploit found, but if they please are so kind to mention which email in which folder, would be reallhy helpful.
OK, many people might just say "delete" but that could mean here the whole email folder is deleted? And i saw warnings for yaha among others, you should first repair the registry keys and after delete yaha and not in other ways to prevent system damage.......
Such things should be part of a repair tool and a good readme instruction going with that!

Still i don't know about RAV (real anti virus? ) till today never heard of it, did you?
It finds yaha/Lentin in zipped, zipped and attached to emails which are attached to another email and zipped again, unzipped versions etc.

Another Dutch site:
http://www.hccnet.nl/404/nieuws.cfm?id=6548

ZeelandNet en Xs4all blokkeren besmette e-mailaccounts

And here is the site of RAV:
http://www.ravantivirus.com/

[Pieter_Arntz]

@Home in the netherlands has followed zeeland.net's and XS4all's example in cutting of customers that are infected and keep spreading viruses. They promise to reconnect the victims within a day after they cleaned up their computer without prescribing how that has to be done.
My guess is more will follow.

Regards,

Pieter

[Paul Wilders]

and XS4all's example in cutting of customers that are infected and keep spreading viruses.

xs4all.nl (a Dutch ISP) is one of the few ones, providing their clients with free security software. Unfortunately, they did choose McAfee as an anti-virus. We pointed the mediocre quality out several times to them. That being said, nothing will help in case a client will not update databases frequently..

regards,

paul

[Jooske]

Then there is one solution: people willing or not, at connecting to internet the free av/at software is auto-updated and full system scan started.
Forcing beta testers to keep their test files on diskettes/cdw

Anyway this is better (the free supplying) then forcing people to get the €36/year software like zeelandnet seems to do, as one might have or prefer other scanners.

Anybody can have been off line for a while and collecting emails, updating av/at and get infected in the meantime, to name an example.

I would prefer to warn the user and give them time (and instructions) to disinfect XX hours before closing their account. And how will the ISP know they are really clean?
Only from the produced traffic? Hmm.

OK, it comes all more or less close to a clean internet obligation, so one could also ask of the ISPs to use strong(er) filters.
Quite a discussion for legality etc.

[Detox]

Wow, I have never recieved a virus in email other than those "joke" ones before today... I checked my email and there was 2 emails fromt he same address (nothing I recognize) both with this virus attached. Anyway AVG (I think, had the bug picture, don't think Avast does that) caught them and permanently deleted them nicely enough.

[Jooske]

I subscribed on many newsgroups --not for infections collection but because the subjects interested me originally--; think those are really nice sources for infection collectors. Most of the groups i send my educative autoresponder after hoaxes and infections are remarkable much cleaner then before and i did not even advice all of them to get my most beloved software (TDS/ WG although it is in my autoresponder text) and i did not intrude their systems to collect the nasties myself unfortunately, although in most cases they came nicely with the postings for my test-zoo.
So one collects even from infections with only 2 or 3 known variants at least 4 or 5 new varieties which i always forward to the TDS lab for their databases.
Today i got another yaha from really unknown source, i searched all my addressbooks, caches, send folder, emails and HTML /DOC/TXT files anywhere on my computer, but this email address was really new to me. It was a fake bounced message (which can be part of yaha) and only one, so i keep watching them.
One possibility could be an infected reply on a bounce email and delete original from my spam protection.

[Detox]

Of passing interest, it was Avast that caught the yaha before AVG... I know it doesn't really mean anything but I remembered Avast is the one that puts a big picture of a nasty insect up when it finds something.

http://www.webwereld.nl/nav/nb?11616

which is translated in English here at Becky's by Robert Kok:

http://66.119.216.59/ubb/ultimatebb....;f=14;t=001524

[diginsight]

The kind folks from @home support Netherlands sent every subscriber a message with the subject "Virus detected!" to inform everyone they will be cut off once Yaha is being sent from your account.

I don't know which moron was responsible for choosing the subject title, but I read on www.troublesathome.nl (not a fan club ) their support department is being swamped by confused callers.

I never use the @home mail server, because it never worked properly and right now it's not available (but that's nothing new). Although I still enjoy my 300 - 400 Kb cable speed

RAV antivirus is one of the few AV natively supporting Novell GroupWise mail server.

[Paul Wilders]

I don't know which moron was responsible for choosing the subject title, but I read on www.troublesathome.nl (not a fan club ) their support department is being swamped by confused callers.

a moron indeed. This is without any doubt not the way to deal with this issue.

Although I still enjoy my 300 - 400 Kb cable speed

Nice - but average . 600 kb should be possible at least. xs4all.nl does even better than that. Time to switch?

regards,

paul

Thanks to Robert Kok at Becky's who posted this link:

http://www.xs4all.nl/uk/news/overview/klez_yaha.html

[Prince_Serendip]

Picked up this little tidbit in the news:

Source: vnunet.com
Date Written: 2002-07-01
Date Collected: 2002-07-01
Title: Indian hackers crack Pakistani sites

The Yaha.E worm was reportedly used by Indian hackers to conduct a denial-of-service attack against the government of Pakistan's official Web site. SecurityFocus researchers reported that the worm created a text file claiming that the cyberattack was the work of 'sNAkeeYes,c0Bra,' who apparently seek to gather others to respond to cyberattacks by G-Force Pakistan with the message
"c0me & w0Rk wITh uS" against "tHE GFORCE-pAKshites." The worm was delivered in infected e-mail attachments, and proliferated by e-mailing itself to all addresses in Window's Address Book, MSN Messenger List, Yahoo Pager list and ICQ list.

http://www.vnunet.com/News/1133119

Nice of them to share their enmity with the whole Internet, eh?

[Paul Wilders]

Thanks Jan,

Although nothing new is being revealed, Robert has an xs4all ISP account for good reasons!

regards,

paul