Discussion
Not sure who needs to know this, but if you download and install the Windows version of Rufus, the free software for writing ISO images to USB/CD-ROM, your PC will end up with about 100 trojans.
Edit: The site I downloaded from was rufus[.]ie which is apparently the official site. During installation, the software threw up a couple of rather verbose messages saying it needed to download additional components.
@cubeos As I mentioned, the installer put up several prompts to install other components, so those probably wouldn't come up on a scan of the installer itself.
@briankrebs I'm just surprised that the behavior analysis of VT didn't catch these either. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/84c8a437f8af89257524478489e5c85f1edf25f761d299e2bcde46ac0afbe106/behavior says it's been reanalyzed 2h ago.
@cubeos you'd have to put it through something like any.run to view the actual stuff that gets installed when you run it. they expired my subscription or I would do it myself.
@briankrebs So I hate to be snarky, but "dd" has been there all along people. Having to install an entire 3rd party application, for something that the OS should have stable, reliable methods for, to format a storage device and transfer a standard filesystem image to it, is intolerable. But it's Windows...depends on curl to download its own updates...
@jab01701mid @briankrebs ironically the official windows installer builder does support writing to USB directly but it doesn't have the customisation that Rufus offers for slipstreaming and deshittifying. But for other non-Windows ISOs? Yeah.
Though it should be noted that for awhile now a lot of images are designed such that if you mount them and copy their contents to the USB partition bare it'll work just fine and this can be done from stock Windows
@jab01701mid You're absolutely right. It's like the flashlight app. Duh. Should be included so people don't search for it and install malware.
@briankrebs huh, that is the traditional official domain for it, isn't it?
looks disputed as a windows defender false positive.
@m3t00 again, the behavior will likely not be noticed by scanning the installer file. Needs a sandbox installation to find out what's really going on.
@briankrebs
What chance do I have, if you get hit?
However, in my defense Google's default search results list rufus[.]ie as the authoritative site
@briankrebs WHO ORDERED THE LARGE DEEPDISH SANDBOX ANALYSIS??
https://app.any.run/tasks/90d1d270-a93f-498f-81d7-84d5e8f156bf
@jordinki thank god! the Internet gods DO exist!
@briankrebs the link the to official site from the GitHub page also links to Rufus.ie so something ain’t right
@briankrebs I used the Portable one when I ran Windows. Is it just the installer, or is the portable one infected, too?
@briankrebs The official one downloaded via https://github.com/pbatard/rufus or https://rufus.ie? 🤨
@sindarina ah that's my problem I guess.
@briankrebs Ventoy is the new Rufus BTW.
No clue whether the resulting ISO is also malicious, but tried running it just for giggles on a spare Windows PC from bootup and the machine's bios said nope, wouldn't allow b/c security policy. Not sure if it's related but I've never seen that message before trying to boot up from a USB.
@briankrebs I only had that problem if you click the skip windows login procedure. Or how ever its was called. (Last time i used it was years ago). then rufus modified the iso to skip the annoying install process which broke secure boot. Last time i used it without that option the image was valid with secure boot. and also never had any "want to download stuff" requests on my whitelist firewall. but may be outdated info.
@briankrebs Please consider sharing samples / IoCs, for instance blogging about it, or scanning the file & URL through virustotal
@briankrebs extremely rare secure boot W?
@demon6 IDK. I stopped counting at some point. It just kept downloading shit.
@briankrebs So, it's like a free pentest? Cause I read this and thought... I should try that. ;)
What happened? Did the old repo get compromised?
@briankrebs uhhh the official version, or did they get hit by SEO poisoning?
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
@briankrebs Do you happen to have the hash of the file you received? I just pulled https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/releases/download/v4.15/rufus-4.15.exe (which is also the link that is on rufus.ie) and it gave me 84c8a437f8af89257524478489e5c85f1edf25f761d299e2bcde46ac0afbe106 rufus-4.15.exe which is clean according to virustotal.