Nimda To Strike Again

Seabass55 writes: "Researchers say Nimda is set to propagate again after rechecking Nimda's code. God help all the MS boxes ... again." Looks like the owners of unpatched IIS machines have until 9 p.m. GMT (1 a.m. ET) to get ready. I'd like to see a nice double stockade for the writers of Sircam and Nimda, and maybe some fireants. Update: 09/27 22:45 GMT by T : Temporal confusion -- that's 5:00 GMT, sorry :) Update: 09/28 00:14 GMT by T : Carnage4Life contributes this link to a command-line tool from Microsoft to list patches already installed or still needed, if you think your Windows machine may be vulnerable.

Comments

9 PM?

[SpanishInquisition]

All NT admins leave at 4:50 PM, too bad for them.

Patch your damn servers!

[jiheison]

I'd like to see a nice double stockade for the writers of Sircam and Nimda, and maybe some fireants.

Maybe just corn syrup and regular ants for the admins who still haven't patched their servers.

Re:Patch your damn servers!

[4of12]

The usual punishment of:

• a hosed server first thing in the morning, before coffee,
• a stack o mail from other irate sysadmins that are getting hit on by the infected zombie to which your name is attached,
• some urgent voicemails and pages from users and from your management asking what the !&%$ is happening.

The usual...ho humm.

Otherwise, Friday morning would have been relatively pleasant.

Re:Patch your damn servers!

[Rogerborg]

• I'd like to see a nice double stockade for the writers of Sircam and Nimda, and maybe some fireants

I'd recommend 25 years of indenduted servitude at Microsoft. Possible outcomes:

• Microsoft learn how to think and code defensively.
• Microsoft learn that bigger isn't necessarily better.
• The s'kiddies have the will to code sucked out of them.

Either way, we win.

Not Me

[NitsujTPU]

I'd like to see a nice double stockade for the writers of Sircam and Nimda, and maybe some fireants.

Are you kidding?

Legislation shows that people have a hard time differentiating what's a serious offence and what isn't.

For one thing, taking this out on someone hard, would only lead to approval of laws like the proposed law to make a bunch of kids in HS "terrorists" for winnuking each other.

We KNOW that these aren't hard to create, kids with no formal training can crank them out like they're nothing. To a 14 year old kid who needs to show off to his friends (and almost all of them do), it's IRRESISTABLE. I can't picture throwing someone behind bars for more than a couple years just because they're virus is effective.

If anything, they need counseling to know WHY what they are doing is bad, that it affects other people and that it isn't just a game, but certainly making an example of these people sets a precident for the treatment of all of us.

In other words, turn some silly kid with a script for making viruses into a real criminal, when people are getting in trouble for stupid stuff like scanning someone's ports, and soon you'll see anybody without corporate backing thrown in jail for having a debugger.

Re:Not Me

[rgmoore]

We KNOW that these aren't hard to create, kids with no formal training can crank them out like they're nothing. To a 14 year old kid who needs to show off to his friends (and almost all of them do), it's IRRESISTABLE. I can't picture throwing someone behind bars for more than a couple years just because they're virus is effective.

But this is really an argument in favor of different sentencing for juveniles than for adults (an idea that I support, and feel that recent laws are incredibly stupid to ignore) not against heavy potential penalties for writing viruses. IMO, writing a virus is the ethical equivalent of starting a fire, and deliberately releasing one is the moral equivalent of arson. Like a fire, a virus has the potential to spread completely out of the control of its originator and cause tremendous damage along the way. Little kids are not generally sent to prison when their playing with matches burns something down, but adults who do so are- and deserve to be- treated quite harshly. IMO any person who is legally competent to understand the consequences of releasing a virus and does so anyway deserves a nice long vacation at Club Fed.

Re:Not Me

[sphealey]

"Legislation shows that people have a hard time differentiating what's a serious offence and what isn't"

Despite the fact that I thought we were patched and secured, the Nimda worm hit our servers. Oops - missed one of those MS security bulletins. My bad.

The cost in real dollars (not "gartner dollars" or "TCO dollars) to clean it up was around $25,000. For one small manufacturing company.

If a naughty kid threw a rock through our window and did $100 of damage, the police would yell at him and call his parents to pick him up. If he threw a bottle of gasoline through the window and did $25k of damage, he would be prosecuted for a felony.

So exactly how is this Nimda bomb not a "serious offense"?

sPh

Re:Not Me

[ptomblin]

but if you have a sysadmin on staff, it's not costing anything real

Maybe this isn't the case where you work, but where I work people use the computers to get useful work done rather than just to provide employement for a sysadmin. If a virus or worm causes down time, or the DDoS-equivalent of all those scans causes people to be unable to reach the internet to do their jobs, then everybody in the company sits there twiddling their thumbs doing nothing. That costs money. So do lost orders because people attempting to reach your web site get a defacement message and probably a copy of the worm instead of your orders page.

Re:Not Me

[sphealey]

"Not meaning to flame you, I've missed my share of security bulletins too. I'm just honestly interested in where that figure comes from. I understand if you don't want to mention specifics due to corporate interest, but even a rough breakdown would be enlightening."

Well, I'm a bit busy at the moment :-(, but a rough breakdown goes like this:

We are in the middle of an ERP implementation. I (who serve as the IS Director, IT Manager, business analyst, and project manager) am six weeks behind on some critical tasks. Fixing the worm took 5 days of my time (about 100 hours - but I won't charge for the lost sleep). I had to bring in several temps to key data that couldn't be pulled from our reports server, bring in our networking consultant on short notice from out of town, pay overtime to the other members of my staff to assist in the cleanup, buy two additional machines to use as recovery servers. We missed several customer shipments because part of the shipment processing system was down, for which we will probably have to pay penalties. We had to pay our EDI vendor to fax us transactions that should have EDI'd in, and Customer Service and Accounting people overtime to key them in manually. We may be charged penalties for not to the customer for not completing the EDI transactions. And so on.

There are real dollars involved when business processes fail. Normally I am not the most even-tempered person in the world, but this time, every time I started to get angry I thought to myself: "and how do they sysadmins on Wall Street feel?", making my problems not seem as critical. But it was a very ugly week.

sPh

Re:Not Me

[technos]

Despite the fact that I thought we were patched and secured, the Nimda worm hit our servers.

Oops indeed! All of Nimda's exploits were old. You had what? Five months? At a total cost of $25,000?? Damn, I hope you have some money put away, because if you were one of my employees, you'd be working at half pay to reimburse the company for your negligence. That's on a good day. On a bad day, you'd be fired, and I'd call Legal to have them sue your ass once it cleared the doorstep on your way to the unemployment line.

Rule 1: If you're an NT admin, you have to stay on top of *EVERY* patch. You don't patch, your company loses money because of your negligence. If you don't patch, you deserve to lose your job.

Now, if you're one of those companies that has lost a lot of 'good men' to rule 1, perhaps you should not use Microsoft products? Perhaps they're not everything the Microsoft rep told you they would be...

Re:Not Me

[Rogerborg]

• If you're an NT admin, you have to stay on top of *EVERY* patch. You don't patch, your company loses money because of your negligence. If you don't patch, you deserve to lose your job

You apply SP6 to NT4 the day it comes out. Your company's Lotus Notes system falls on its arse. You lose your job.

Admins have a hard enough job keeping a known, stable system running without applying day-0 patches every time Microsoft figure they're screwed up again. Applying patches immediately and automatically isn't a black and white issue, and all your sound and fury won't make it so.

Re:Not Me

[psin psycle]

If he threw a bottle of gasoline through the window and did $25k of damage, he would be prosecuted for a felony.

We've know about these exploits for many many years. There are even patches for them, fire retardant materials and bullet proof glass. For some strange reason though, it is still the bottle thrower who is at fault and punished, and not the poor facilities guy who didn't upgrade the bits that make up the windows to something that cannot be attacked.

Why the double standard? In the 'real world' good-enough security is, well, good enough. In the computer world, good-enough security gets laughed at and scorned.

What?

[jpinnix]

No double stockade and fireants for the IIS creators?

Learn Internet Security Or Get Off The Web!

[BIGJIMSLATE]

I believe this Wired article applies in this case (as many machines are still left unpatched), as well as an idea of what some ISP's are considering/doing if their subscribers don't have a clue.

(Plain-text link):
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47037, 00 .html

sircam may me feel warm today though...

[edrugtrader]

a video game i wrote 10 years ago in Qbasic was just emailed to me today via sircam...

that means that someone actually had it on their computer, and that made me feel all fuzzy.

god bless sircam, and its glorious resurrection and distribution of great software titles.

Re:sircam may me feel warm today though...

[BIGJIMSLATE]

I had a similar case, but it involved some porn. Now naturally I'd be happy about that under normal circumstances, but not if it's my freaking SISTER!

EWW.....

Re:sircam may me feel warm today though...

[ocie]

Yeah, it's good to see that push technology is finally coming to the net :)

Re:sircam may me feel warm today though...

[geekoid]

isn't that the wierdest feeling?
I went to a someone house to find out why there PC was running slow, they had a program I wrote 8 years ago, and they were still using it! I did ask him why he never sent the author the shareware money(10.00). he said "I'm sure he made so much money he won't miss my 10 bucks".
then I told him it was me, and NO ONE sent me ANY money. boy did we laugh. Of course he still hasn't paid me my 10 bucks...rat bastard.

Fight back

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out my script! If you're running Apache, it'll monitor the logfile and send mail to the Administrator of the infected server!

Why the sudden infux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is windows suffering so many of these attackes recently (I know this is the same but I mean coupled with Code Red etc)? Is it becuase the exploits have only recently been found that enable them? This implies that fewer such exploits existed in older MSware - is this true?

Is their widespreading mostly helped by the recent influx of cable/dsl users? Instead of the usual MS bash, could we try to explain some of the factors that make these stories so common on /. recently?

Of course, we can't escape that it was Microsoft that published exploitable code but I'm sure their software has always been as bad so what else is behind the current surge?

Re:what do you mean again?

[ncc74656]

Ditto...I'm up to nearly 13k hits logged since Nimda began, vs. a bit under 10k Code Red hits. The weird bit is that the number of Nimda-infected hosts is much lower...400 vs. 3500 for Code Red. Maybe it spends so much time banging away at the same system that it doesn't spread itself as effectively as Code Red.

Re:Again?

[Pathwalker]

I saw a sudden dropoff in Nimda infection attempts a while ago.
It's quite obvious if you look at the graph I have here.
One moment, the nimda hit count is heading straight up, the next, a sharp bend to the right as the rate of new hits drops to almost nothing...

Math?

[sharkey]

9pm GMT -04:00 (EDT) is 5pm EDT.
9pm GMT -05:00 (EST) is 4pm EST.

However, the time mentioned in the article is 1am ET. Hazard a guess that it is really EDT they are citing, making 5am GMT zero hour. It will be 12:00am (Midnight) EST.

Nimda cost me Microsoft.

[standards]

My organization was hit hard by Nimda. Our poor Windows Administration staff ran around like crazy cleaning, patching, and upgrading hundreds of machines.

Is this a Microsoft problem? You bet.

Microsoft OSs do not have a complete, common set of system administration tools built in. This results in haphazard machine administration.

Microsoft and other companies sell useful administration tools, but these are high priced tools that only do a piece of the job. And since they aren't included with the OS, very few sysadmins have expertise with them.

So Microsoft, get on the ball. If you want to sell an OS, it should be ready for the enterprise.... including enterprise administration.

In the meantime, we're porting our apps from IIS to Apache. Yay!

Re:Nimda cost me Microsoft.

[bad-badtz-maru]

Our organization didn't do squat because we spent five minutes researching commonly accepted practices for securing IIS and NT boxes before we ever put our first box on the net. We do the same for every piece of hardware and software, exploits are not an MS-exclusive thing. The simple act of unmapping unused extensions in IIS has saved us countless hours (or days) of agony on many occasions. I suspect your organization may not contain the level of security-conciousness necessary to properly maintain systems connected to the internet since such security-awareness would have included remedial research into the securest method of presenting a piece of hardware or software to the internet. In other words, if your organization knew what they were doing, the issue you experienced would not have occurred. It's not an apache/IIS issue, it's a poor administration issue that will plague your organization, unless corrected, regardless of what OS and web server software they choose to deploy.

Hope this helps,
maru
www.mp3.com/pixal

Re:Nimda cost me Microsoft.

[NMerriam]

Our organization didn't do squat because we spent five minutes researching commonly accepted practices for securing IIS and NT boxes before we ever put our first box on the net.

Unfortunately Nimda spreads itself over shares, too -- so our server was well-maintained, but every shared directory on there was filled with the .dll and .eml files from Nimda that users had been infected on their desktops.

All it took was a single person on our network who had disabled their antivirus to spread it all over ever network drive in the place.

Dangerous Viruses??

[dragons_flight]

Whatever happened to all the "3v1|_ h4x0r5"(TM)??

We seen a number of highly infectious viruses in the last year (Sircam, Code Red, Nimda, etc), but none of these were actually very destructive. Sure they are a pain to get rid of, and may spread a little information around, eat up bandwidth, or compel you to reformat just to be sure, but they aren't flattening people's systems.

Whatever happened to the anarchists out to destroy the system? Now admittedly I don't want to encourage people to be more destructive, but it seems almost trivial to think of ways that viruses and worms could easily be made more destructive. For instance, upon infection, delete everything in the "My Documents" folder. Or, change default web page to a share of the whole computer. Or even wait a couple days and then wipe the person's hard drive.

I haven't been vulnerable to anything to come along lately, and I'm glad, but I'm also glad to note that the truly skilled black hats out there seem to have moderated how much damage they actually intend to do. I wonder if they are scared what the law might do to them if their attack truly was evil.

Re: How can I protect myself?

[none2222]

. . . running Win2k and IIs on my dorm computer. Am I at risk?

To put it mildly, YES! While it's true that Microsoft products are no less secure than those of other vendors, Microsoft's position as market leader makes them a prime target for hackers, virus writers, and other internet terrorists. You really have no business running a web server until you learn something about security. You can start by reading up on Nimdahere.

Terrorists?

[Ghoser777]

Here's what most terrorists do. Atleast this is what I've heard/seen done by past terrorists:
1. They take hostages
2. They kill people
3. They make demands
4. They invoke terror in their victims

In no way do these "hackers" fit the description of a terrorist except for maybe #4. These are generally just people who find a whole in security and take advantage of it. They can be really annoying, and people who make these types of viruses should be tried for damages, but I don't think they fit the desciption of a terrorist.

But more important, I think Ashcroft isn't talking about virys writing hackers, but any type of hacker. Essentially, if you mess with a system at all, then you're a terrorist accroding to Ashcroft.

Boy, my parents must be disappointed in me now, rasing a terrorist..

F-bacher

If you follow good practice...

[drinkypoo]

Then you're not vulnerable to either.

Good practice in this case means keeping your systems updated to the latest patches, not having open shares at all, and updating software to the latest version. It also includes not using software known to be not only a security risk, but basically an open door to "hackers". Note the quotes, please. They indicate sarcasm.

If you have patched Win2k to SP2, are running IE6 final, and do not use outlook, you have protected yourself from every vector these worms, except for the "Web Folder Traversal" issue. That's a minor quick fix, though it shouldn't have been necessary.

Why am I willing to specify not using outlook and not specifying not using IIS? Because it became abundantly clear that outlook was unsafe well over a year ago, whereas IIS could have been terms "more or less okay" until recently. Also, you just can't walk away from NT/IIS webservers and jump on the *[iu]x bandwagon right away, because there's all that ASP code lying around.

Until M$ rewrites outlook, outlook express, and IIS from the ground up, you should immediately (or as close to immediately as you can get) stop using them. Given that IIS sucks anyway, you might as well stop using it permanently. I understand the allure of outlook, and the interoperation between it and exchange, but consider a web-based scheduling/collaboration system. Exchange is pretty lousy anyway, for a whole bunch of reasons I won't bother going into here.

And finally, this is not anti-microsoft FUD, this is all based on reality. I'm not against microsoft on the desktop, or microsoft servers to serve microsoft clients. But we've seen time and time again how running microsoft windows of any flavor as a web server platform incurs a much higher cost than unix, because unix just doesn't tend to break as often -- Or be compromised. While this is not an OS-level bug, you really only have one choice as far as performance and support goes for a webserver on windows, and it's not a very good choice.

Re:If you follow good practice...

[Spy Hunter]

WARNING to IE6 users or people without Outlook installed: You are not invulnerable! A virus file on your system can still easily be excecuted. I recently got infected, and it was the dumbest thing ever. Some time ago I had to reinstall Windows (gdi.exe was corrupted!?!), so I backed my files up to my friend's computer over the network. To get them back I made an open share on my computer (should have had a password) and sent them over. When I was done I noticed that some *.eml files had been inserted into my open share. "Hey, that's the virus I read about on Slashdot," I thought. So I went to delete it. I simply selected the file to delete it (I didn't run it) but Explorer, in its infinite stupidity, ran the file in the preview pane! Simply by the act of selecting the file I had run it inadvertently! This on a system running IE6 without Outlook installed!

Fortunately I was able to boot into Linux and delete all those .eml files, then download a virus remover from McAfee or someplace. But let this be a warning: Before deleting a .eml file, TURN FILE PREVIEWS OFF!

I am so sick of this

[ellem]

I administer Notes, NT, Win9x and a Linux box, plus firewalls yadda, yadda.

I work in a Corporate Travel Agency in NYC, they just decimated my entire staff and I have me and one other guy who has been relegated to inputting ticket refunds.

I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS! My lone IIS server has been patched since the first day. Lotus Notes doesn't care about these dumb ass viruses (virii) and my Norton's are all up to date.

My USERS got this crap from infected web pages!

We're losing a machine a day in the field b/c these bozos can't figure out how to click on a button called VIRUS_FIX on the corporate intranet.

I am ready to frigging quit and become an English Teacher fuck the money! If the whole MS world can be brought to its knees everytime some kid in Sweden has the day off then we're all fucked.

CIOs who continue to use Outlook/IIS deserve whatever happens to them. (We HAD to use IIS for a 3rd party software app.) Micorsoft SHOULD ABSOLUTELY BE PAYING IT'S CUSTOMERS BACK FOR THIS! HOW DARE THEY GET READY TO RELEASE YET ANOTHER VIRUS RUNTIME OS.

It is seriously time for the MCSE farms to be shut down and for corporate America to move to another OS. Fuck the users; guess what they don't know all that much about the OS they are on switching them now will have no lasting impact.

Re:SysAdmins....wake up

[Roofus]

Heh, I work with a guy who isn't the brightest at times. He's been setting up a 2000 Server that's been hit twice with nimda in the last week. He reinstalled the server from scratch after each infection. His response?

"I put the computer on the network to install Norton, and it keeps getting infected before I can get the updates"

Ok, TWO THINGS:

1) If your going to install IIS, do not plug it into the network you've shut down IIS. Then go download the updates.

2) Norton isn't going to stop you from getting infected, it will only warn you about it during a routine check. If you want your machine to stay healthy, PATCH YOUR GODDAMN SYSTEM.

Seriously, Microsoft has a little utily called HFNetChk that will scan any local or remote system and will tell you what patches need to be applied. This includes system, IIS, and SQL Server, and IE.

Not all updates are listed on the little automatic update website.

Sigh...

How long until someone drops the bomb?

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's anything surprising about the entire worm phenomenon, it's that the payloads have been so benign. There's absolutely no reason why that has to be the case though, and sooner or later some little shit is going to slip in something like:

FORMAT C:

as the ultimate payload of a nimda-like worm, and all hell, and I truly mean all hell is going to break loose.

I think that it's absolutely shocking that no one knew until right now that the damn thing is going to start up again tomorrow. What else don't we know about the program? I certainly hope that the experts who are now giving us some six hours notice (at night!) that the damn thing is about to restart haven't missed any other little details of the worm's operation.

The entire ISS/Outlook security situation is absolutely shameful. Microsoft has been fucking around for years piling on layer after layer of buggy, insecure active this and executable that into the Windows mail system, and pretending that it doesn't matter, and the result, today, right now, today, is an internet that's about as secure as an airport with no guards, and half the locks in the terminals and on the planes flat out nonfunctional.

Someone is responsible for this mess, and it ain't the folks who wrote the RFCs!

Administration tools

[fahrvergnugen]

The sad truth is that patches to protect yourself from these worms were released well ahead of the worms themselves. Getting hit by it is irresponsible, but Microsoft's current patching procedures are such a mishmash that getting the right information ahead of time is a total bitch.

Those who are forced by circumstance to be responsible for administering IIS and other microsoft software should look at St. Bernard Software's UpdateExpert. It's a little pricey, but it doesn't cost nearly as much as even one full day of nimda / CodeRed / etc. infection.

It simply keeps a list of all patches released on the Microsoft support site, and lets you roll them out to machines on your network without the users knowing about it. It's saved my bacon a few times now.

The myth of regular patches

[Carnage4Life]

If a piece of software requires regular patches for serious security problems, that's probably a sign that its basic approach to security is flawed.

But does IIS really need patches as frequently as you imply? Code Red, Code Blue, Nimda et al exploit the same security hole that is almost a year old. The problem is that for every security hole, there are several waves of worms because IIS admins simply never patch their boxes.

If you disbelieve me check out Netcraft's security survey which shows how long several IIS boxes have gone unpatched and that about 12% of SSL sites (meaning they are probably eCommerce related) running IIS have been "rooted".

Read between Gartner's lines

[alienmole]

Did you read the Gartner report carefully? It said "enterprises hit by both Code Red and Nimda" should investigate alternatives. This implies that enterprises not hit by both worms don't need to switch.

If a company wasn't hit by both, presumably their security policies and procedures are either already up to scratch, or capable of being improved sufficiently. But if a company was hit by both, their procedures are probably beyond repair, and they'd be better off with a server that's more secure by default.

So I think Gartner was absolutely correct. Not only that, but people who didn't pick up that subtlety from the Gartner report are also more likely to need to switch servers, so the report works either way! :P

I smell an ASP migration product opportunity

[Sagarian]

After Gartner's recommendation, thousands of PHB's and even sane people will rush to switch from IIS to Apache / IBM HTTP Server / whatever.

Has anyone written a product yet to translate Active Server Pages (ASP) code to PHP, JSP, or some other format? Most of the basic scripting language concepts should translate pretty nicely.

Even if someone has built their IIS / ASP application 'correctly' (cough cough) isolating middle-tier logic to MTS or something similar, wouldn't Perl / Java / whatever wrappers to those COM / COM+ services also be straightforward to write?

Or has someone done this already? Isn't there (or wasn't there) a Chilisoft implementation of ASP that you could run on Apache and Linux?

Serves You Right.

[Drake42]

(I already made this as a reply to comment, but I'm irked about this enough that I want to post it to the main thread in hopes that people read it)

I bet you have security guards, fences and cameras to protect your buildings from 14 year old kids.

Why don't you have a secure firewall to protect your servers?

We are living in the time that 100 years from now people will look back and think we must not yet have evolved properly. They will look back and think, "Why did they put up with that idiocy? Were they just stupid back then?" And parents will shrug and grandparents will say "It was like the frontier!" and kids will think "Wow. Those guys were stupid."

Don't bitch about the lack of govenment protection when all you have to do is install appropriate security which costs NOTHING. I don't want my taxes paying to protect you from your own laziness.

25K lost? Serves you right.

Re:Serves You Right.

[SuiteSisterMary]

I'll point out that a firewall won't protect from this, as these are legitimate http requests. Your gateway anti-virus solution and/or intrusion detection system, on the other hand, should catch these. But this sort of thing is NOT what a firewall is supposed to stop.

Don't want the attacks clogging up your logs?

[rayvd]

If you run Apache and hate looking at the hundreds of annoying attacks by the Code Red and Nimda worms, try adding these to your httpd.conf:

SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/default.ida" attacks # For Code Red
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/scripts" attacks # For nimda
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/c/winnt" attacks # ... ditto all the way down
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/_mem_bin" attacks
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/_vti_bin" attacks
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/MSADC" attacks
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/msadc" attacks
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/d/winnt" attacks

CustomLog /var/log/access_log combined env=!attacks
CustomLog /var/log/attack_log combined env=attacks

This will dump all the "attacks" into a file called attack_log and leave your normal logfile clutter free.

Re:SysAdmins....wake up

[q-soe]

We use netchek and it works like a charm - the problem we had with Nimda was that the SAP servers connected to our network but maintained by the providor (we are in month 3 or an Enterprise Rollout) were unsecured and not running any virus protection, we got slammed by nimda - it did not hit any of our servers in the front door thru IIS but spread to boxes not running IIS but connected to the SAP system and to dekstops from there.

Thats then thing that really pisses me off, we spend the time to lock down and secure our netowkrs, hours patching systems and making usre virus scanners are up to date and then we get slammed by servers we have no access to or control over - yet we are the IT dept.

If we cant maintain it and gurantee it safe then it should not be on my network dammnit !

Re:Again?

[reverius]

That's not possible... any significantly large company that was going to change something like that would need an obscene amount of time to switch to "something less vulnerable"...

somewhere around a year and a half. :)

Re:Why treat this so flagrantly, Tim?

[einhverfr]

Strange, I could have sworn nimda only used a selection of old, well known exploits, the patches having been available for anywhere between 1 and 6 months...

That is what everyone says. However, I have a hard time believing it because I have seen it hit systems with those patches on it.

I even saw it hit an XP system with a read-nly share (NTFS Permissions denied write access) and IE6 (which is not supposed to be vulnerable. IIS was not involved in either case, nor, surprisingly was Outlook, at least not directly...

eh... actually I'm glad about these viruses

[hypergreatthing]

There shouldn't be security holes that allow these viruses to exist in the first place. Don't blame the kids who wrote this, but rather blame microsoft. I'm sure you can use the excuses that microsoft can't be held responsible for everything their software causes, but this is rediculous. Why did it take tons of viruses for microsoft to even patch this?.. Why wasn't this patched before, or caught before and addressed? It's simply because microsoft can't afford to make their software secure until it's demanded, and that's just wrong for a company like microsoft.

Nimda is a tough worm to keep out of a network!

[Nonesuch]

Nimda is complicated beast.

Unlike 'Code Red', Nimda does not spread by pushing the worm binary in the HTTP request. The worm uses HTTP to find a vulnerable IIS server, then causes the IIS server to make a TFTP request out to the attacking host to retrieve the ~64K binary.

Most normal 'secure firewall' products aren't tuned to block outbound requests from the protected servers to internet hosts. Mine are, but that only gave me about 72 hours of lead time before it came in another way...

Even when firewalls block the IIS scanning, Nimda spreads by email, file shares, and by putting a copy of 'README.EXE' in the root of the IIS server and adding Javascript to all web pages on the server, pushing the worm at users of the infected web site server.

My firewalls block _all_ UDP packets, but my network still got hit hard, and probably incurred more like $60K in 'paper losses' -- lost productivity, bandwidth, overtime, etc.

We haven't found 'patient zero', but we have two good suspects, in both cases a user with a laptop that did not have updated anti-virus software and that got infected from one of these routes:

1. User took the laptop home and connected to an infected network/file shares.
2. User accessed 'hotmail' or a similar site and downloaded an attachment.
3. User visited an infected web site (probably at home) and ran README.EXE when prompted.

The common thread here is user error.

The best firewall is no protection against malicious, or just plain ignorant, users. Blame also falls on local admins for failing to push virus signature updates and keep up with system patches.

I've only ever seen around a dozen inside hosts from which the work was actively scanning HTTP, but the worm traffic from those dozen machines alone was enough to severely degrade WAN and firewall performance.

Re:Windows Update?!

[Meorah]

Ehh. You can't judge a book by its cover. "Windows Update" will not supply hot-fixes for security updates. These are combined with all the other new features, bug fixes, and security fixes in a SERVICE PACK. You can definitely get all your service packs from Windows Update, but you'll have to wait for them to actually come out. This is obviously unacceptable, which is why MS started releasing separate hot-fixes for any security flaws that simply had to be implemented immediately, and couldn't wait on any service packs.

You might also want to read the directions for the tool you are using before jumping to conclusions about what the "WARNING" means. Read the security bulletin, and try to figure out why they made it stand out from all the other patches.

So, in summary... MS used to release Service Packs for fixes/updates/additions/bloat/etc. Although this is adequate for non-life-threatening issues, it has quickly become inadequate for security. MS releases a free tool to be used AS A SUPPLEMENT to Windows Update, which will allow you to apply each new security hot-fix as they release them, instead of being forced to wait on the next Service Pack.

"CRITICAL UPDATES" are where Service Packs are placed. Those 8 hot-fixes are part of SP3, but you can download them now since they relate to security making your system vulnerable to certain viruses and trojans.

With the increasing awareness of security, I'm surprised that you assumed anything, when you could have taken 10-15 minutes on MS's site to find out how clueless you were.

Re:SysAdmins....wake up

[Judg3]

Agreed, HFNetchk essentially looks for Registry keys that state which patches are installed. If you use it, always use the '-z' switch, which tells it to not look for the registry entries. This makes it take a little longer, because it searches for actual files, but it's ALOT more accurate.
Also, eEye has a neat little NIMDA Scanner which will do up to a Class B net looking for exploitable machines. Sometimes finding a machine that COULD be infected is harder then finding the actual infected ones.
URLScan is nice, but you really need to know what your doing to run it, as it's easy to mess up a webserver thats running fine.
But the most important thing to do is to get on those security lists, NTBugtraq, MS security lists, etc. As well as hitting the big security related sites out there before your morning cup of coffee to make sure nothing new has come up.

It's all basically common sense, but every now and then you need a nice reminder.

Here's how I'm getting them patched

[DrSkwid]

I've gone through my logs and found quite a few

What I do is go connect to the offending box via smb

Usually they have a printer attached to it so I print out a page of A4 with :
"YOU ARE INFECTED WITH NIMDA, SORT IT OUT
here's how : http://www.antivirus.com"

on it in 72 point text

it's working so far

if they don't have a printer then they usually have an open share that's world writable so I leave text files called

you are infected with nimda.txt

and put the url inside them

that's closed a couple too

(I also found a keygen I'd been looking for so that was a bonus)

I'm not sure if nimda resets the passwords but which might not lead to a surprise of how far you can go with

un : adminsitrator
pw :

have fun