Cleartrip is used for booking flights, hotels
and IRCTC Indian Railways tickets
in India. It is a leading online booking portal. Recently,
I was searching flight information on www.cleartrip.com
and my desktop antivirus delivered the following alert:
Infection alert of AVG antivirus.
AVG had detected a Blackhole exploit
on the following page:
hxxp://www.cleartrip.com/eadserver/delivery/afr.php?zoneid=43&target=_blank&cb=0.027297518110020458
Let’s take a look at a wireshark capture taken while
visiting the page.
Packet capture snapshot of cleartrip.com
The page content of “hxxp://www.cleartrip.com/eadserver/delivery/afr.php?zoneid=43&target=_blank&cb=0.027297518110020458” was broken, but after a bit of searching on the site, I was
able to ultimately find the same malicious code with intact de-obfuscation
logic.
The URL identified this time was:
hxxp://www.cleartrip.com/eadserver/delivery/afr.php?zoneid=43&target=_blank&cb=0.46843633663340656.
For further analysis, we’ll take a look at page content. A snippet of the code is shown below:
Code source of blocked page
Much of the content is obfuscated, so we’ll need to first
de-obfuscate it in order to analyze it further.
Let’s look the obfuscated code delivered this time:
Obfuscated code souce.
De-obfuscation of the aforementioned code reveals JavaScript
which was creates a 1×1 pixel iFrame pointing to “hxxp://trafficgoodster.info/banners.cgi?advert_id=1&banner_id=1&chid=341aa8fca26bcff7830499c1c5f8e359”
The de-obfuscated code is shown below.
URL in iFrame tag
Fortunately, Google has blacklisted
that particular URL.
Let’s take look at source of the page:
Source page view.
This URL displays a .gif file, but if you look carefully,
you will see that an iFrame is also delivered. It is this URL (highlighted
above), which points to the Blackhole Exploit Kit.
The .info domain used in the iframe is registered for one
year and was registered only recently. Naturally, newly registered domains tend
to have higher risk as they attackers often register new names for a single
attack. Let’s do a whois query on the domain:
Domain Name: TRAFFICGOODSTER.INFO
Created On: 14-Jun-2012 07:52:31 UTC
Last Updated On: 14-Jun-2012 07:52:31 UTC
Expiration Date: 14-Jun-2013 07:52:31 UTC
Spammers also prefer .info domains as they as less expensive
to register than .com or .net domain names.
A de-obfuscated version of the contents is shown below:
A De-obfuscated contents.
Zscaler has informed cleartrip.com on this infection.
I thank to my colleague Pradeep Kulkarni for helping to analyze this infection.
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