Slashdot Mirror
Win32 Blaster Worm is on the Rise
EvilNight writes "You know you've got it when a 60 second shutdown timer pops up on your screen. The virus uses the RPC vulnerability. It looks like it's reaching critical mass today. Luckily, it's an easy one to stop: Download this security update. Once you've installed that patch, go here and
download the removal tool." Update: 08/12 19:19 GMT by M : Security bulletin URL corrected.
My friend was getting hit constantly by this worm yesterday. The box wouldn't stay up long enough for him to install the patches :P. Just a tip for those of you who are getting hit a lot and having your box reboot: To stop those pesky reboots try:
/a
shutdown
That should abort the shutdown and give you enough time to install patches. This also works well when you install a piece of software that trys to force you to reboot. (Why he hadn't fixed it already is a mystery, especially since slashdot.org is his homepage.)
Visualize the world of wine
Shouldn't the "Removal Tool" link point to a Linux ISO download site or something? I mean, this is slashdot... :-)
DOOM-DOOM-DOOM-DOOM DOOM * PANG*
At 10:06 AM, August 12th, 2003, Skynet launched dah Win32 Blaster Wahm. It quickly seized contrahl of ahh computers on the Net and forced a mahndatory reboot.
OK this is getting old.....
Dear all of you who are being hit by this attack:
Why hadn't you applied the patch before? It was released 7/16 and nothing has had this level of publicity before.
I've been helping my friends get this NASTYNESS off of their machines too.
Something else you might want to try is booting into safe mode (F8 right when Windows splashscreen pops). Deleting the registry entries, and the virus runprogram (msblast.exe). Also please... PLEASE patch your computer.
When you're done, run some AV on your system. Some ppl had a 2nd virus sneaking around that they didnt even know about (Spybot.worm).
-Tim
Yes, you can cancel this. Start up a console session (oh wait, this is Windows, it's called a command prompt) and type in:
C:\WINDOWS>shutdown -a now
Granted, this does leave your system in an unstable state, but if you have something urgent you absolutely need to get done, this gives you a few minutes to do it before you reboot.
"Hu, ho, ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Hu, ho ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Mario Paint! Whoaaa!"
If this thing wouldn't keep crashing computers, it would be spreading like greased wildfire.
Read more on SecurityFocus' mailing list.
BOO! TERRO
My friends and I discovered that turning on your windows firewall (Windows XP) also stops the shutdowns. (Wish I had known that BEFORE I formatted my computer) Unfortunately, I told my parents about this 'epidemic' of computer error (I heard about it from my cousin in Kansas before it happened to me, and then some friends here got it at the same time), and I'm sure that now whenever something is wrong with the computer my parents will get a big serious face and say "You know, it's probably an epidemic".
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
Internet Storm Center
Microsoft Bulletin
Note this is marked "Critical" now...
The removal tool takes several minutes to run.e fault. asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-026.asp
Just apply the exact patch and remove the msblast.exe from your windows/system32 directory.
Then run the tool afterwards to ensure it has
gone.
The exact patch needed is here
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/d
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
If you want to stop the timer from fscking with you, simply set your clock back a few hours right after the timer appears. Any time you subtract from the clock is added to the timer. This will give you time to install the patches. We got lucky, this one is mostly harmless. This vulnerability was patched on March 26th, btw.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
I work at an ISP, and over half of our tech support calls yesterday were because of this worm. You wouldn't believe the number of people who thought we were somehow going into their computer and not only kicking them off the internet, but rebooting their computers. (Yes, sir, the tech support staff feels horribly underworked today, so we thought we'd make things more exciting and pi** off a few customers in the process.) I hope they find the person involved and perform medical experiments on him.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
Then try, really, really hard to stop laughing...
Cheers,
Ian
While you should have the MS03-010 patch installed, it is the wrong one for this worm. Make sure you use MS03-026. This is the patch that it links to in the removal tool link.
There was even a Slashdot article about the exploit. It was such a big deal because it was the first and only vulnerability for Windows Server 2003 so far.
All these people sarcastically saying to "patch with Linux" or "use the firewall" are missing the point that the smart people downloaded the 1.2MB patch last month and had no idea anything was going on until we read about the worm on Slashdot. My entire work network was unscathed, because they're all kept completely up to date. I can't think of any reason why someone shouldn't be doing the same to their Windows network, except for arcane Slashbot conspiracy theories or just plain needing to hate Microsoft for something, anything.
If this was a Linux worm, people would be telling everyone else that they should have patched to the latest versions of whatever. But, it's Windows, so it won't exactly happen that way...
"Sufferin' succotash."
Windows is easier to pick up, but just as hard, possibly harder, to maintain than *nix. So you get less-trained or less-capable or whatever people who are employed doing this, who look fine on the day-to-day, but who are damn-near useless at the harder stuff like security - which should, of course, be the day to day.
Combine that with the sheer number of sever and critical patches MS expects you to apply, each of which must go through regression testing before deployment, and you can see why sticking the ol' head in the sand looks appealing...
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Start\Settings\Control Panel - Administrative Tools. Services. right-click "Remote Procedure Call (RPC)" hit Properties. click the Recovery tab. set "First Failure", "Second Failure", and "Subsequent Failures" to "Take No Action". that will keep it from trying to reboot as you clean. good luck.
here are some nice screenshots i made on the msblast and the hidden message "I LOVE SAN"
who wants to rule the world?
or maybe the machine reboots every 60s
To make this smile even bigger: Compile this and execute it as root (all ports below 1024 are restricted and needs root permission to be listened to)
Now you can actually *see* when the worm tries it's futile attack on your superior OS.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I got the worm yesterday, and found that when the "shutdown" popup appears, just reset the system time... you have a full minute to that. I just pushed the data back one year, and the shutdown is postponed a year! then you can run a full system virus scan, and repair tools
Regards/
JP
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
I know this is Slashdot and all the Linux users need their daily affirmation that they are right, but guys, lay off the common user. To expect someone over dialup to have Windows XP patched with the 200 MB of updates since XP came out is rather harsh. I know this hits more broadband users, but working in tech support, we have seen a fair amount of dialup users get hit as well. So before telling the everyday user to switch to Linux for their home machine, maybe we should get Microsoft to check their product for problems before shipping it out.
Something similer happened to me yesterday. A friend of mine immed me saying his computer kept saying it had 60 seconds to reboot, and something about rpc crashing. So I responded with a screenshot of dir c:\ running on his machine.
Moral of the story: I'm an asshole.
(For the record, I then told him where to get the patch, and how to cancle a running shutdown.)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I welcome our new Skynet Overlords.
Welcome to the corporate world. All things, including service packs, must be tested on all platforms with all applications before being deployed into the environment.
We don't have a couple dozen windows boxes. We have a couple hundred thousand. Patching is *painful*. We're not talking purely servers that are affected--standard workstations. Servers get patches at a much faster rate than the user desktops.
Even after the 4-6 months goes by and the patches get the official blessing for end-user install, users don't like watching the service packs run for half an hour when they login. Besides, who trusts the users to sit around and let them install without playing with stuff.
So....We filter internal site connections to try and contain infections, and work as quickly as possible to mitigate the risks of downtime for system updates vs. the risk of collateral damage (outages) caused by Microsoft's weak code and security practices (AKA bug).
After two years, we're almost done with the Windows2000 conversion, but Microsoft has already been pushing for immediate XP deployment for a year...
Why aren't they all patched? Because nothing moves fast in large installation bases.
Yes, yes, I know, this is /. and we all know this. My point is that the mainstream press is starting to make the distinction now.
A nasty work is quickly spreading across the internet forcing about 90 percent of the connected computers to become inoperable. Thousands of phones are ringing at IT desks all over the world. On the other ends of those phones are screaming, panicky users crying because their computers won't work. Management is calling because now you're the bottleneck causing inefficiency in the team, and you might need to start looking for a new job if this isn't taken care of. And then you trip over a network cable.
I think getting hammered is the best thing to do right now.
'You'd think every hotmail account would get a message saying "Plug that hole" from whoever it is that runs hotmail.'
Actually, in my hotmail spam repository account I already do get tons of messages saying things like that. But, I don't think they're talking about computer security. =)
Now, I didn't get hit -- between the firewall, ZoneAlarm and the patches, I think I'm Ok.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I patched my home machines probably within 24 hours of the patch being available. I've got a couple of machines, and nobody is depending on their uptime to make a living or maintain a professional corporate image. If only the real world were that easy.
My company lives in the real world. We were hit by this, but pretty lightly, a couple of machines and we were lucky enough to pull the plug on them and cut it off before it spread, mostly because I was monitoring slashdot, and I knew the symptoms of the infection the first time it came up internally.
Our firewall wasn't breached so much as apparently circumvented by a laptop belonging to a user that never accepted the patch -- he got the virus at home, then came to work and plugged in. I assume that just about any company with a firewall at all isn't allowing incoming TCP 135, so I'm guessing that hard-hit companies generally got it this way.
We had identified this patch as critical, even relative to all the other less-critical critical patches. That still meant we had to test it outside of production, which took some time, and we also had to keep an ear to the ground to find out if any of the (many) folks out there who apply patches without testing first had been burned by this one.
When we were satisfied at that point, we had made it available internally to all workstations via SUS -- worst case scenario here if the patch is bad is a lot of re-imaging, but no loss of data, no loss of critical network services, etc. We don't have workstations set to auto-install the patches, so that requires the user to click an install button to complete the process. In many cases, the users had done that. In some, they hadn't.
At that point we started pushing it out to machines via SMS, workstations first, and then starting to patch the servers. (I wish I could give you a timeline for each step here.) Again, we proceeded conservatively, not getting every box at once, and not letting SMS force our servers to reboot after the patch installation, but instead asking various sysadmins to schedule reboots for servers at an acceptable time as soon as possible after the patch was applied.
So, some servers were patched by yesterday. Probably half were not, especially if you count those that were patched but not yet rebooted, which you have to count as not patched, I guess. To my knowledge at this point, we cut this off before any servers were infected, which was really just luck once it was inside the firewall. It could have been worse, but at the same time, many of our boxes were safe by the time yesterday came.
Now, of course, we are frantically patching and rebooting. And if we had been a little more frantic beforehand, we could have easily had it done before yesterday. But little else is getting done today. We've got over 100 Windows servers to deal with here, production, development, testing, IIS, SQL, SMS, DCs, Citrix, physical machines, virtual machines, you name it. It is not trivial to get this job done. And doing it in a hurry is dangerous as well.
And we're lucky. All our boxes are at one location. I'm looking back at how we handled this, and I think that a little more focus and emphasis and we could have patched everything by now, but the attack could just as easily have come a week sooner, and we'd still be having this conversation.
The difficult truth is that, in many cases, it is possible to develop an exploit for a vulnerability more quickly than it is possible to adequate test and deploy a patch in a large and complicated corporate environment. You patch as quickly as you safely can while still getting everything else done, and you also take all the other steps you can to mitigate the damage if you get hit. That's the real world.
Let it be suffice to say that if a company is trying to sell you something based upon the FUD factor, treat the information as suspect. I agree, vendors whose software doesn't sell on its own laurels hype the hell out of the FUD factor and give the industry a bad reputation. But don't lump these vendors in with the security consultants that are trying to provide a free service and free advise based upon information that is going around in the security community.
When you get security information, consider the source. Is the security information provided with a sales pitch attached? If so, google the information to determine if it is FUD or legetimate. If it's legit, it'll pay to listen.
Regardless, people, patch your *#&($*@& machines!
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Think about this scenario: a perfectly competent administrator has a properly configured firewall which blocks the problem. The "road warrior" brings his laptop from from 3 weeks on the road and had used a bunch of hotel access points where he got the worm. He connects it to his docking station in the office effectively bringing the problem behind the firewall.
That's the legacy of MS policies like "DOS ain't done till Lotus don't run!"
You just know you'll let auto-update run and one day it'll "disable" your MP3s because WMV offer so much more security, or something similar.
Too bad that this "check daily, patch, reboot" procedures never get mentioned in any MS-paid TCO-analysis.
Microsoft tested Windows NT 4.0 and Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition. These platforms are vulnerable to the denial of service attack however due to architectural limitations it is infeasible to rebuild the software for Windows NT 4.0 to eliminate the vulnerability.
Well, we patched what we could, and moved most critical services to Linux, but there's still one or two machines running NT. And it's only a matter of time before some luser slips a copy of this worm past our firewall....
Considering the amount if infrastructure that depends on NT4, doesn't this intentionally put the US at greater-than-necessary risk? I'd be fun to see M$ tried under the new anti-terrorism laws.....
I was experimenting with nessus several months ago. I unchecked the "safe checks only" option and ran it against a series of internal Windows systems and crashed RPC. I thought "wow, this could be really dangerous if nessus'd a range of public IPs."
The only real solution in this case is a good firewall and keeping up with the endless stream of security patches; unfortunately, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided that users can't turn off RPC's network functionality. While turning off services you don't need is good security practice, there are some exploitable services that the system needs and you can't just turn off. RPC falls into this category, and you can't do much besides firewall and patch it.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Since the shutdown tends to occur the moment you access the internet, do the following;
1. Unplug internet connection
2. Enable Win XP firewall on all valid connections
3. Connect internet connection
4. Download and install the patch from MS
5. Update anti-virus or download and run the removal tool
Good Luck!
Proverbs 16:18 "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall"
for analysis here
Also some cool screenshots of the beast in action here, and here
Don't worry I know your problem.. You put the wrong boot disk in.. The one you want is the CD that says LINUX not Microsoft Windows XP. If that doesnt work.. Open up you case and find the worm.. They are a brownish colour some are a couple inches long.. good luck!
Now, this being modded as funny is REALLY sad.
.x = new release = full price .xy = maintenance upgrade = free.
Apple's versioning is as follows:
So, 10.1 was full price. 10.1.1 was free. 10.2 was full price. 10.2.6 was free. 10.3 is full price. 10.3.x will be free. 10.4 will be full price, etc.
Apple does not sell upgrade CDs. You buy a full install. This means you don't need to have any previous version of OS X on the machine. So compate the right things. So let's put this in terms the Microsoft Marketing Influenced(TM) can understand.
I paid $129 for the full version of OS X. You paid $299 for the full version of Windows2000 Professional.
I paid $129 for the full version of Jaguar. You paid $399 for the full version of WindowsXP Professional.
I will pay $129 for the full version of Panther. You will pay >$399 for the full version of Longhorn Professional.
Now who should we laugh at?
For all the ranting slashdotters do on how stupid the non-tech/geek person is, I find it hilarious that such a logical, programmer-centric versioning system totally confuses said slashdotter.
I guess MS was pretty smart to call Winnt 5 Windows 2000, and Winnt 5.1 Windows XP, or you'd all be screaming about that $399 "upgrade" as well.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.