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SoBig: Worst is Yet to Come
bl8n8r writes "Experts say when vacationers get back to work
Monday, Inboxes will unleash the worms worst attacks.
Sunner said that most of the problems caused by SoBig involve the time and cost of cleaning the worm from computer systems.
"
If the majority of the cost comes from cleaning the system, I would recommend (in my professional opinion) simply letting the systems remain infected.
lysergically yours
IAALS.
This article claims that time wasted will cost businesses tens on millions of dollars. It seems to me that no matter how much spam/virus flooding/crap you get in your inbox, you only do so much work everyday. If you take five extra minutes to clean out your inbox, that's five minutes less of surfing slashdot or screwing around. Deadlines don't change for viruses-- people still have to work as much real work as ever.
2 worms (DCOM and Welchia) and a virus variant in less than two weeks.
This should tell investors that they are wasting their money.
This should tell companies that they are wasting their money.
Someone, somewhere, will hopefully get a clue.
Wait till infected laptops & workstations start moving back into the dorms!
Our computers aren't getting infected: between virus scan, ZoneAlarm, ancient e-mail client and knowing not to open the stupid attachments, we've not gotten infected.
.procmailrc file, put :0 B /dev/null
But >1000 100K e-mails per day to a single address were swamping our ability to do anything but download and delete.
It took two days of querying tech support at my ISP before they'd admit that procmail would work, and a quickie recipe dumps all the infected files. Yay. I should have just done it without checking tech support, for all they helped.
This was listed in a previous thread, but it's worth repeating:
In a
* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
* filename=".*\.(pif|exe|scr)"
This deletes any message with a pif, exe or scr attachment.
I'll get more sophisticated later once I learn more about procmail, but for now, this does the job, without having to worry about SHELL and PATH settings.
Design for Use, not Construction!
So far this week, I've received only seven actual copies of W32/Sobig. However, the number of messages from mailer-daemons and mail server virus scanners has exceeded this by a factor of ten. Some of these rejection messages actually include a copy of the infected .PIF file.
You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field. I didn't send it, my Mac is not infected. You're just annoying me. Please go away.
At best, this is collateral damage. At worst, these rejection messages are actually advertising the IP addresses of infected systems. Should a virus drop a back door payload, this would multiply the damage.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Don't complain.
With SoMany.IT.Workers unemployed, SoBig.And.ItsVariants have a strangely positive side effect...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Normally we don't block emails with specific attachments at our post office because it takes too long to scan them. Our company of 100 people averages 14,000 legit email per day in and out, but with this outbreak as bad as it is (and not peaked yet!) the blocking is being instated tonight.
While musing with a programmer here who just moved her daughter into college, we brought up an interesting thought: Hundreds of thousands of college kids are moving back into dorms with huge fat pipes and Outlook style email clients on computers that haven't been patched since April or May. Yikes!
-Shadow
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Did your mom help you think of that comment?
Prozac makes the voices in my head say nice things to me.
Design for Use, not Construction!
did a statistically significant portion of the workforce on vacation this week?
that seems like a pretty weak overall premise for an expected resurgence.
now if he said that he expects a steady stream of continued activity into early next month, due to all the people who take vacations throughout august - he might have a point.
but to suggest that these 'vacationers' will unleash the same spam deluge monday that the rest of the unwashed have given us this past week, is a bit shaky.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field.
The situation is even worse than that: Most (all?) of the virus scanners sending me autoreplies correctly identified the virus as being Sobig -- which always uses spoofed source addresses.
Sending autoreplies is sometimes useful, but these scanners should at very least have a table which tells them, for each virus, whether an autoreply should be sent (ie, a table which specifies if a virus uses spoofed source addresses).
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
String the last two 'default' headlines together and whaddaya get?
"New Longhorn Screenshots Leaked. Sobig. Worst Is Yet To Come."
Yep. That just about says it all!
This will be used by countless FUDmasters to con Joe Sixpack into things like:
Accepting DRM/TPCA (otherwise unsigned code can run)
Outlawing P2P
Port filtering by ISPs
Accepting blind AutoUpdates
[US]Cheering on the Patriot Act[/US]
'outlawing' Spam
All in the name of 'security'. Insert obligatory Franklin quote: Those who would trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Sunner said that most of the problems caused by SoBig involve the time and cost of cleaning the worm from computer systems rather than the destruction of files or the opening of files to outsiders on the Internet, which can be problems with many computer viruses. Pescatore said that the cost of both technical support personnel and lost productivity by the computers' users can range from $500 to $1,000 per infected machine.
...
And who is Marc Sunner? he's the CTO of MessageLabs. And what does MessageLabs do, you ask? see for yourself, from the main page at messagelabs.com:
Email security today is a global issue which pervades whole organizations. Viruses, spam, pornographic material and other harmful or unwanted content represent a serious risk to your company. To combat these all too real threats, you need a total, proven and effective solution. Only MessageLabs can assure you of complete peace of mind from complete email security
$500 to $1000 to clean up each infected machine? Right, whatever Marc. And it's obvious you don't have *any* interest in propagating that baloney too. (on second thought, if you hire me to clean your machines, I'll do 5% discount off that price).
Another fine impartial article reposted by Slashdot. (By the way, the word you're looking for is "advertising")
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
According to the article, since SoBig is much more successful against servers that do not have very good spam filters, the excessive SoBig traffic has prevented a lot of spam from being sent since it's eating up the bandwidth usually used by spammers. I'll have to admit that while I've had a LOT of SoBig spam, I have seen a decrease in other spam over the past few days.
So is that the solution to spam? Maybe someone should write a worm that always has the same payload so it can be easily filtered. We never have to see the fake spam messages, the real spammers won't be able to send harder-to-filter messages, and the server owners of those loose servers will have an incentive to clean up their act with the worm eating up all of their bandwidth.
Actually, extending this, maybe the way to fight open machines is to cause the open machines to send themselves excessive traffic, rendering them fairly useless until their operators fix them, but not negatively impacting the rest of the net.
paintball
What I find discouraging is that the lemmings are falling for it despite this being The Week of Teh Worm.
All the hopeful articles that have sited users claiming a new awareness of the risk of worms and virii seem to be pipe dreams.
Dumb users are dumb users and the more infectuous and persistant the virus, the more networks are going to get hammered. Why oh why aren't all pif, scr, exe, com, and vbs attachments just blocked by the MDA. There is no good reason for allowing an end user the huge complexity of choosing whether or not to click on the latest attachment that's come to them from "the internet".
If the lemmings are getting suckered this week... when every news medium is blathering on about viruses worming their way through nuclear reactors and motor vehicle registration offices, what hope is there for when the attention has settled?
The idea is courtesy from the macosx forum
We haven't seen the virus. But then again, we're admins who know what we're doing...
That's right, we run $CO UnixWare. And since there are only 2 or 3 other copies of $CO UnixWare being used in the world, we don't have to worry about worms and viruses.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Aren't you lucky. Here's what our email server cought since Monday:
237 W32/Yaha-E
235 W32/Klez-H
009 W32/Sircam-A
004 W32/Bugbear-B
003 Dial/PecDial-B
002 W32/Yaha-K
002 Troj/Peido-B
001 W32/Sobig-F
001 W32/Klez-E
001 W32/Bugbear-Dam
Only one Sobig so far... But Klez and Yaha numbers have been high for months. Too many of our users have front-facing email addresses (posted on our corporate website).
Looks like in addition to all the garbage we've been getting as a result of this virus propagating (the virus itself, attachment-free e-mailings by the virus, mis-directed automated notifications that "Your mail server sent us a virus", bounces to people whose addresses were spoofed by the virus, probably etc.), we can expect the infected computers to start being used as relays for the sending of "normal" spam -- with the corresponding spike in spam volume that would bring.
According to this article:
And Symantec:
My ping times to www.mit.edu (my personal benchmark, as its on the next POP over and always up) are normally 25ms from home, they grew slowly from about 30 ms Monday morning to as high as 2600 ms yesterday with 2/3 packet drop. But today and especially in the last few hours it's fallen back to about 29 ms with 1/3 packet drop.
;)
There are still occasional storms, I guess as a new host gets infected nearby. But things are good compared to the last two days when I couldn't even listen to internet radio and plain old web browsing and e-mail were slow...
BTW I haven't seen any of the e-mails myself do to our spam filter but I have gotten some returned e-mail the virus sent and a non-tech friend who got this one and another friend (who's very non-tech) got last weeks virus. I usually don't personally know the people who get these things, it has been a good week for discussing an OS upgrade to Linux with non-techies
More annoying than the worm are all the "You are infected" warnings coming from clueless virus software. They make it through the spam filters.
Also keep in mind that refilling the washer fluid in your car will not prevent you from getting a flat tire.
Just this morning I changed a flat tire on a car that had a full tank of washer fluid and discovered this.
No, child, it's a worm. That's why they named it after your penis.
Honestly why would a user run a PIF attachment anyways? Would you use unknown medication? Why would you run unknown attachments? Simple solution: Server.CreateFilter(attachments, PIF)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
If you're a company and it's going to cost you the money to clean worms, get a mail scanner. We haven't been infected with a single email worm for as long as I've been here at the company. (2 years) and we have 1400 users. I think a kink in the budget for scanmail once was a kickass investment in that we have been immune to every single worm (we actually patched everyone in time for the d-com worm as well, so we didn't get that one) If you're going to use windows, get a mail scanner, and deploy your patches via Group Policy before you hear about the exploits. And no, we don't have windows automatic updates enabled either, that's definately not the answer to anyone's problems, at least not in the corporate world. It may be good for people at home, unless they have dialup, then they're f'd, and shouldn't be trusting their computers to microsoft software. May I suggest a preventative approach: NTBUGTRAQ.com has a nice mailing list that seems to keep at least a few days ahead of the exploits. Russ Cooper has saved us more than once.
Speak for yourself.
You don't need to wonder -- just read the news:
It's long overdue for law enforcement to prosecute spammers for cracking (evasion of antispam filters, relay-raping, disseminating viruses to create zombie spamboxes, etc). Many of the people that do get prosecuted for cracking do less damage and target fewer victims (by several orders of magnitude) than the typical spammer./. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I had a user that called me because he actually got a copy of SoBig in his inbox. Usually our mail scanners are really good at filtering out even the newest viruses. What I didn't realize is that our AutoUpdate had failed that day, so it didn't have the SoBig update. So I asked him, "Well how the heck did you get SoBig?" and he answered, "From eating so many sandwiches."
Linux during a virus epidemic, it's like being out of the country during the blackout.
This week alone our entire department has been thrown around, manually patching EVERY box on the network. That's around 50,000 computers. Today alone I ran across probably 10 Windows NT boxes that were still running THE FIRST SERVICE PACK!
My point is, I do NOT feel sorry in the least when companies like 3M lose millions of dollars because they don't hire a competent IT department. Hell, out of the 20 guys I work with, only myself and two others graduated from a 4 year college. Whatever. For the last four days when full-timers have been bitching at me while I upgrade their PC because their order-tracking software won't work, I just smile and tell them "you get what you pay for. Tell your bosses to hire a competent IT department and you'll never have this problem again." Then I walk away and sigh because I know it'll never happen. Guess paying a contracting firm $40/hr so they can turn around and pay me $13/hr while they get to save themselves from paying benefits is worth the millions of dollars in downtime.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
With the MSBlast worm running rampant right next to the recent re-release of the SoBig virus, it's hard not to be involved in the removal and sanitization of a computer system, especially for the majority of /. readers and participants.
Face it, most of us are in a technical position of some sort, and are looked upon for assistance because of the knowledge we possess.
My question is this: Who pays for our time? Is YOUR company expected to "eat" the costs of paying you for your time to sanitize their network from this malicious traversing code? Should it be the company's fault for utilizing software so prone to public vulnerabilities? Should the creators of the vulnerable software be held liable and accountable for their obvious flaws? Of course, tracking down the creators of the viruses is left up to the law enforcement officials and the persons charged with solving crimes. But, the viruses would not have existed if the vulnerabilities did not exist and were not exploited accordingly.
I understand that the Glock company cannot be held accountable if some person used their weapon to terminate somebody's life. However, in the act of homicide, there is a definitive exchange of decisions. In the case of the virus, the infected party neither intended to receive the virus, nor wanted the problems associated.
Hmm... Nowhere does the article say the only Windows machines are infeccted by and propagate the worm.
The SoBig worm is the latest in an outbreak that began 10 days ago with the so-called "Blaster" or "LovSan" worm which, by some estimates, infected more than 500,000 computers running the latest version of Microsoft Windows, the world's dominant operating system.
That's the only place Windows is mentioned, with regards only to Blaster.
xox,
Dead Nancy
*sigh*. Nobody pays helpdesk people 74k in the US unless they have money to burn. If they do, let me know where I'll stop coding and start working helpdesk. All you need is a level 1 heldesk "dude" who makes about $10 an hour running around with a disk and the fix on it. Never mind if you applied the patch over a network. I have a mixed environment at work of Macs and PC's (and work on both) and the macs are no less crash prone than the PC's.
The only advantage to a mac is you don't have to worry about viruses for it because it's market share is so small no virus writer would be bothered with writing one. It makes more sense to hire a network admin who is halfway decent, updates virus protection etc than to change over to mac. Not to mention the costs involved with retraining people to use a mac.
If everyone followed your plan and switched over, do you really think that you wouldn't see more viruses and worms on the mac? I think mac users are a bit naive to assume they don't get worms/viruses because "mac is better". It's because virus writers for the most part don't know and don't care about mac.
I've already had to help a few people remove SoBig from thier systems and found that SARC has a removal tool that cleans up SoBig quickly and effortlessly by: 1. Terminating the W32.Sobig.F@mm viral processes. 2. Deleting the W32.Sobig.F@mm files. 3. Deleting the dropped files. 4. Deleting the registry values that the worm added. For those who need it it can be found at http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sobig.f @mm.removal.tool.html
According to a swedish newspaper (I'm sure others run the story as well by now), anti-virus programmers have now finally cracked the 20 IP addresses SoBig will get its updates from this weekend. It's now a race against time to shut those IP addresses down. The IP addresses are located in USA and Canada.
The reason it took this long to get the IP addresses were because they were heavily encrypted in the code and they couldn't to the usual "dump memory" trick when the virus was active since the IP addresses were only stored in memory just when they were needed, then the memory was freed.
The anti-virus guys at F-Secure don't know what will happen if they don't shut down the 20 addresses in time, only that something might happen if they don't take down all addresses.
Unusually clever actually, since I usually find viruses to be rather poorly coded and much like a hack job, like the Blaster virus that shouldn't have crashed the Windows computers much more efficiently go unnoticed. Anti-virus developers have also noticed this about SoBig and it is not very exhibitionistic either, like viruses usually are. These signs suggest that it's a more professional work than usual.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
i'm a current student at Carnegie Mellon Univ. and about a week before everyone's slated to return, computing services sent out a letter saying that they were scanning the network for this worm and if found were removing machines from the network. If your machine has been removed, you gotta patch it and request it be re-allowed.
it seems like a pretty good way to go about preventing it from spreading, and even non-techies at my school will jump on the patch once they read the part about getting kicked off the net (read: AIM/Kazaa/email)
We can argue until we're blue in the face about responsibility but frankly it doesn't matter. Make anyone vaguely connected (and catchable) responsible and the problem will be solved. Make MS responsible and they'll tighten up their OSes. Make users responsible for sending viruses from their computers and they'll soon put pressure on MS for better OSes and keep their virus checkers up-to-date. Make the PC vendors responsible and I'm sure we'll get imporvements too. But as it is we have a situation where nobody is held accountable and that means it's simply never going to be fixed.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Why the hell would I use wine to open e-mail under linux? Linux is not spreading this shit the MS UI is. Get your facts strait. The fault is entirely MS they are counting on this kaos so that they can step forward with the ultra secure win 2003 server and then the Longhorny security solutions. Your are spreading fluff and fud! Yes everyone is going to rush and secure their computers with Longhorny. But as Ben Franklin said "Those who sacrifice freedom for security will gain neither."
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
"Sunner said that most of the problems caused by SoBig involve the time and cost of cleaning the worm from computer systems."
My experience with this virus may be abnormal, but I have to completely disagree with that statement. As a dispatch tech for a large state university, I've been up to my eyes in emails related to the virus, but have only found However, the amount of email traffic on campus has been mind-boggling -- it even took down our mail servers a few times. And less than 10% of the emails were from the virus. Most of them were f*cking auto-notification emails from other servers that someone had sent the damn virus, which thanks to the spoofing feature, was almost never true. Why don't server admins turn off such notifications when dealing with a mass-mailer/spoofer virus? All these assorted servers managed to do was clog up our mail server with these meaningless "you have sent us a virus" emails that do nothing but contribute to any damage the does!!
IMHO, the REAL cost of dealing with this virus was bearing the burden of 100,000 stupid auto-generated emails that other servers were sending us, in response to emails that didn't even come from us.
This is where procmail comes to the rescue! Add this rule:
N
/dev/null. And if you get a NEW strain, just take an encoded body sample from it and make a new rule!
# Ignore W32/Sobig.f@MM
:0 B
* ^vZgwXohhqrN4MDHpZfjXC6Aye4uyh5TU7soFb85wpJILzujH
/dev/null
This matches the worm on a base64 encoded line from its body. This is on the current variant I got flooded with; redirect the suckers to