Mobile Malware Sends WAP Push SMS

I had already seen mobile malware SMS messages with a malicious URL inside (e.g SymbOS/Yxes), or MMS messages (e.g SymbOS/Album.A!tr, SymbOS/Beselo!worm…) with a malicious attachment. However I had never noticed a mobile malware piece sending a WAP Push SMS (special SMS messages typically used to send ringtones, wallpapers, OTA provisioning etc).

The recent SymbOS/NMPlugin.A!tr does all three ! It sends:

- an MMS, whose title is “Hello Skuller”, and contains an attachment named Sunset.jpg

- a SMS containing a short message and a malicious URL from which to download another Symbian malware. This message is written in Chinese (it uses the UCS2 character set) and says something about some of your friends having uploaded two videos to the malicious URL

- a WAP Push SMS message, using China Mobile’s cmwap access point, and sent to UDP port 2948. This port is typically used for WAP Push Service Indication messages (WAP 167).

WAP Push Service Indication messages are special SMS meant to notify the end-user that a new service is operational at a given URL. Unfortunately, so far, the body of the message hasn’t been identified, so we cannot be sure this is what the malware is actually sending. However, if this is the case, a WAP Push Service Indication would be particularly dangerous for at least two reasons:

First, WAP Push messages are usually considered as high priority SMS and hence often automatically displayed on the mobile phone (see ‘signal-high’ parameter in WAP 167). For an attacker, this is nice because there are higher chances the message will be read by the victim.

Second, on some phones, a vulnerability prevents the phone from correctly displaying the originator of the message,so the victim may think the URI is sent by his/her (trusted) operator (see Figure below). For attackers, the downside is that WAP Push messages are not supported by all mobile phones.

Figure 1. Example of WAP Push SI message that does not correctly display the originator. The victim may consequently think the URL comes from a trusted party (system administrator).

– the Crypto Girl.