Simple Backdooring Torrents.

Publicated on : 1210141219
Alright this is fun and a bit old school, I finally got around to write about this too. What I will be talking about is a trick to fool users in userland to into executing an executable. Which is really one of the most used techniques in trojan or virus writing, and it can be very reliable. The trick is to let the user think that the action he is about to take is legitimate. Like clicking on a JPG, which actually is an executable and will be treated as such. Imagine this simple scenario;



You download a torrent from a website, and you will be downloading the latest album from your favorite artist, in a compressed archive. The nice seeder was so kind to include album art into it, so you couldn't be more happy. Sounds familiar? then pay attention to what I am about to say. With Windows shortcuts we can easily trick users into executing our executable.



The steps.



0. We start with 1 file, namely an executable which we rename to cute_blonde.jpg

1. Create a shortcut and change it to: C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe /c cute_blonde.jpg

2. Change the Icon of the shortcut, see figure 1.

3. Set all files besides the shortcut to "hidden".

4. rar/zip all of it, and you are ready!



Figure 1.







In figure two I changed it to an Explorer Icon, which will point to our hidden executable. You can change it to whatever you like of course.



Figure 2.







Pretty easy isn't it? There are many ways of going about this, and many different methods to gain control of someone's PC. This is one of the most easiest ways, and certainly very convincing. The basic conclusion is as always: don't click anything, even if it looks like a JPG.



But you already knew that right? ;)