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Microsoft "Swen" Worm Squiggles Into Sight
greenhide writes "As forecast in this story, a new Microsoft worm has indeed wriggled to the surface. The W32.Swen's claim to fame is its professional looking email advertisement that pretends to be a fake Microsoft patch. Earlier viruses have made the claim, but none of them looked this good. It appears to have infected over 1.5 million machines. "
After all these worms and virii are hitting MS boxen from every angle, there still aren't mentions of alternatives from major news sources. The Dallas Morning News, last week, had at least a causal glance by saying in one line "Macintosh users are unaffected".
Why isn't Linux and Macintosh turning this into a big propaganda opportunity? Both OS's can hold up the 'come to us, we've had our shots, we'll never get worms' flags and pray that the big media mentions it.
The virus needs user interaction to propagate. Hence it is an e-mail virus. Only programs that propagate automatically are worms. One cannot necessarily expect the Washington Post to get such technicalities right. However, it would be nice if at least /. used proper terminology.
/. we known anymore, would it...
Then again, if it did, it wouldn't be the
Hypothetical advertisement: "Hey, we're Macs, and we don't have viruses."
I guarantee you that every virus writer and his(/her?) grandmother would flock to OS X and start writing viruses with reckless abandon. Apple, Linux, Amiga, Commodore 64, and whatever other less-used operating system is probably perfectly happy to have its users sitting fat, dumb, and happy and not bragging about it.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
I can't help but feel that people have accepted the fact that Computers in general get Viruses. People complain about Windows, but Windows, to most people, is the only solution. So for them, the concept that Windows gets hit with so many viruses means that users in general get hit. No matter the OS.
I was explaining the other day to one of my business partners not to install this virus, and to delete it right away if he gets it.
He asked me if my computer was infected, whereby I had to explain once again that running Linux, I generally don't have to worry about things like this.
But the point is, for him, computers just get viruses. And because of that, I believe that most people are thinking: "Hrm, my computer got a virus.", not "Windows let another Virus through."
So the majority of the people that aren't really computer illeterate (the majority), don't really know what to think when people tell them Linux is more secure.
Because for them, it's still running on their computer, and their 'computer' got a virus. It's just their mentality. Of course, this is simply my opinion.
Jason Lotito
You know that if the situation in Terminator 3 (virus spreads over majority of systems) were to ever happen, it would happen as a result of having a massively homogenous computing environment. I really think that we should stop teaching kids how to use Word and Excel in middle school, and start teaching them how to install their own linux systems. We could create an army of informed computer users, something that Microsoft fears the most.
The Ro Factor - Jeep/Linux Weblog
Please don't get me started....
I feel pretty damn safe under Linux, how do you feel worrying about when the next worm will take over your entire machine?
Gee, since I've never been infected by a virus or worm, and I've been using Windows since forever (both client and server side), I don't feel I have that much to worry about. Since I'm pretty confident I know how to use a computer and all its associated software properly, I don't think that Linux is that "magic snake oil" that will solve all my problems.
BTW, I don't use Zone Alarm.
dude, that knoppix cd will be useful when the windows installation gets kicked up a notch, it's really handy to have a cd like that to retrieve the really imporant data out there.
it's also good enough to keep you on 'net while you're trying to figure out wtf went wrong.
unless you got an as good a windows running livecd system?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Or he patched it when the vulnerability was originally released, OR he is behind NAT, or any other way the worm wouldn't have a clear shot at 135.
:)
Zone Alarm is not the be all and end all of worm prevention
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
Oh no, this multi talented worm is:
But wait! Theres MORE! It has its own SMTP engine. It attempts to halt anti-virus processes. It alters the registry AND THEN it even disables the ability to edit the registry!
Quite a nasty beasty really. And even for us nice safe Linux/BSD users there are issues. Clogged mailboxes are at least, a nuisance, at worse, a huge bandwidth cost. Those on dialup or liimited broadband access where you pay for d/ls and uploads will notice it!
So even those of us cheerfully NOT patching frantically have consequences. The celebrations of yet another MS problem are a bit premature it seems to me. I'd rather see more outrage that such an inherently insecure and easily manipulated OS is costing ALL of us online.
Nothing - well thats something.
There are several reasons what you said was just plain wrong. There were a lot of ways to avoid the RPC (MSBlast) worm. First, you could have patched when the patch was first released. It pre-dated the worm by several weeks. Second, you could have been running the built-in XP firewall. Third, you could have been running a 3rd party software firewall such as ZoneAlarm. Fourth, you could have been behind a firewall on another box or behind a hardware firewall. Fith, you could be behind a NAT box that is set not to pass incoming connect attempts to LAN side (which is the default setting for the 3 home routers I have owned). Doing any one of these would have dropped the likelyhood of getting the RPC worm to zero or near to it (e.g. it's perfect until and infected machine is hooked up behind the firewall). How are people who took one or several of these steps lucky? I have 3 Win boxen among the computers on my home network, none got infected. Though my router was catching about 5-8 infection attempts a second.
If you were using XP and you didnt get infected by the RPC worm you were lucky. The only way you could defend against it is Zone Alarm.
Lucky? Zone Alarm?? Well, at least you were able to show that you really don't know much about Windows (or at least not as much as you think you do).
-- Kircle
I don't understand how people think this virus looks professional. The text is filled with typos and garbled and confusing to an experienced computer user like myself, it must come across as utterly incomprehesible to an inexperienced computer user. A presitgious software developer like Microsoft would never design such a crappy interface!
So, what happens when the user gets an email that looks like it came from support@apple.com and it tells them to install a binary file?
Same damned thing.
You can't patch the vulnerability that sits between the keyboard and the chair.
Although Microsoft has tried. Anyone running a version of Outlook released in the past 2 years can't open the binary attachment that this worm sends. If that was attempted elsewhere people would be crying bloody murder.
The article said just viewing the email infects you.
Knowing Microsoft and their bugs in their mail client, the best way to secure your machine is to stop using Microsoft products. I dont use IE, I dont use anything Microsoft but their Windows OS itself. I remove as much of their junk as I can and I run my own stuff like Mozilla.
In Linux everything is open source so at least I can look at the code and know what software not to run, dont run poorly written software and dont run servers.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
With operating systems as complex as they are today, I don't think it's necessarily fair to target Microsoft in the way many Slashdotters do. The major reason for viruses targetting Windows has to do with its dominance. Sure, MS often makes some boneheaded decisions, such as the data=program in email philosophy, but then the worm described today is based on social engineering, other than specific technical, as opposed to philosophical, bugs. If Red Hat, or SuSE, or Mandrake, or Gentoo, or Xenix, ever become the dominant OS, you can expect every mistake the FOSS community makes to be punished as much as Microsoft's.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
W32.Swen is really aggrevating me over here. In the past few days I've received over 1000 copies. And I'm not terribly happy about it. I'm probably averaging at least 100 per hour during the day, and about 300 at night (when my primary e-mail system is offline).
The really irritating part? My _entire_ network consists of one OS/2 box (the e-mail client machine), and three Linux boxes. Not a single one can be infected by this virus, and not a single one could propogate it (unless I explicitly wanted to do so, which I don't).
Now thankfully I'm on a pretty decent cable modem service here (really good speed), bogofilter was quickly trained to detect and toss these messages into a SPAM folder (where they quickly get deleted), and my mail client (PMMail/2) has a remote control feature that allows me to scan message titles on the server and delete the messages without downloading them.
But still -- imagine if this weren't an immune OS/2 machine, but one of the Windows machines that could be infected. I could very well be propogating these as well. But because of my good choices in OS's, I don't.
Thus, I think I'm doing a public service by _not_ running Windows and propogating these viruses, but instead act as a sink to prevent them from propogating. My machine is the end-of-the-line for these viruses -- even though getting thousands of e-mail is highly annoying, my machine (in effect) "kills" the ones I receive, causing their propogation lines to end.
I think Windows users on the Internet owe those of us who run other operating systems, and they owe us big. They can start paying up by PROPERLY PATCHING THEIR SYSTEMS!!! (Stopping sending me $^&*%^&!! hundreds of copies of W32.Swen would be really helpful as well).
Yaz.
"Classified as a worm because of its ability to copy itself without infecting host files..."
What a bunch of morons!
Lets look at what distinguishes a Virus from a Worm: .exe and .doc files so that when they are launched or opened the virus will then spread further.
A virus requires user interaction to spread. A virus can be a self standing executable (such as Swen) or it can infect other files such as
A Worm is self propagating and does not require any user interaction to spread. Worms rely on holes that exist in the underlying operating system to inject their code into applications already running in memory. Once they have infected the target machine, the worm will then self propagate to other similarly unpatched machines.
With this simple definition, where do they get off calling swen a worm, when the swen virus clearly requires some dumb schmoe to click on the executable file that is included as an attachment in an email? Once the genius launches the bogus.exe file, it then searches the newly infected machine to harvest email addresses to send itself to. There is no 'automatic execution' of code here.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
"After all these worms and virii are hitting MS boxen from every angle, there still aren't mentions of alternatives from major news sources."
It's not up to the news media to mention alternatives, they're supposed to report the facts. Likewise, when they report the recall of, say, Ford Explorers, they don't report Cheverolets and Hondas as alternative cars. They can mention alternatives in editorials, and last I looked, they do.
A lot of people wil blame it on "dumb" end-users. However, the scary thing is that just by an end-user clicking on the attachment in the email, they could hose their system. Even if an end user executed an attachement under Linux, it would only run as an that user, not Administrator or root. The worst that would happen is the users home directory being deleted. This is why MS Windows security is so bad IMO. Every user runs as Administrator out-of-the-box. This is the only reason ms windows is said to be "user friendly". Take a user out of Administrator mode and it is not any more user friendly then Linux. MS picked user friendly over security. Sure there are some tech savvy ms windows users that can secure their boxes much better then the masses. However, for the average user, MS gave them a friendlier environment to work in with no regards to the value of their data.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
No, because Linux by default does not put every user into the administrator group. If you run a malicious attachment, it will be pretty much harmless to the machine. It may be able to wipe out your home directory, but that is about it. Plus, I haven't heard of any Linux mailer that will execute an attachment for you, it usually only saves it for you, or maybe display it if it is an image. If MS would not make every user an administrator by default, then most of these viruses would be stopped cold. However, the user friendliness of MS Widnows would drop considerably and not be much easier to use then a Linux desktop.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
No troll, I'm dead serious.
I wish people took more interest in the things that they use every day and take for granted. Everything is so completely fascinating. I think that there is no better pursuit in life than to learn the hell out of everything. The way people learn one thing and then get all arrogant about it is, in my opinion, the worst behavior of all.
There are tons of things that I don't know, I don't look down on people for not knowing things. It does bother me when they refuse to learn, though.
People do awful things to their computers and people do awful things to their cars (and their plumbing!). If people took a little more time to appreciate the things that they take for granted, many of our problems would be gone.
I didn't mean for this to end up all preachy, but I don't remember where I was going. If I hadn't already typed so damn much, I'd just quit now, but hell...
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
If popularity is what makes Windows insecure, then why is IIS being hit many more times than Apache even while Apache runs 60% of the websites out there?
I've heard that argument before, but it's still wrong. A program running as you has the ability to delete your email and data files and the ability to send out email to propagate itself. Who cares if it can mangle /bin/ls? I care much more that it can mangle /home/patrick/important_document.tex. Being root has nothing to do with anything.
That is why the "Linux viruses" you see are only in the labs of the anti-virus vendors.
No, that's because most virus writers and most victims are running Windows. Why write viruses for a desktop that only 1% of end users (and the 1% most likely to keep their systems patched) are running?
A well designed operating system security model will prevent the infection.
Your statement is true. Your implication that Linux's security model is well designed is not. Your email program can, if hijacked, execute programs, open network sockets to arbitrary hosts, and delete files. It doesn't need any of those privileges, but Linux has no mechanism to protect you on that level. All Linux can do is keep your email client from mangling /bin/ls -- so what?
Linux isn't prone to floppy-borne, executable-modifying viruses. But it certainly could be prone to email viruses if anyone finds a buffer overflow in pine, mutt, or Evolution.
A well designed worm (or a virus for that matter) can pop up an important looking window saying something bad has happened on the system, please supply the root password to fix it. Haw many casual Linux users (if there are an?) do you think would fall for that? When you're running KDE or Gnome as a regular user, you'll get prompted for the root password when performing many system-type tasks. A smart worm could even wait for you to click on something before popping up, so that it doesn't appear as if it came out of nowhere.
No system is immune by design. Stupid or careless users are always crafty enough to bypass even the best security.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
1.) Applying the patch
2.) Using *any* software firewall. Even WinXP's own firewall. ZoneAlarm is trash in my opinion.
But it isn't your only protection.
3.) Using a hardware firewall which blocks the RPC port anyway
4.) disable dcom with start -> run -> dcomcnfg
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
The worst that would happen is the users home directory being deleted.
That is always the worst thing that can happen. If a virus wipes out my System32 directory, big deal, I reinstall Windows. It's a pain but I haven't lost anything. If it wipes out my home directory, that has all of my financial data, electronic reciepts, business invoices, contacts, etc.
Don't get me wrong, your email client shouldn't have admin privilages, but I consider my machine hosed when my home directory is hosed. Linux is no more secure in this regard.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
That's true of any environment. If a windows computer uses IMAP and doesn't store the password locally it can't delete your mail either.
Who said you had to use the SMTP host on the network? Any old program that knows how can speak SMTP and mail itself out to the next victim. In fact from what the article says this virus knows how to speak SMTP. For an external MTA it's pretty hard for it to only accept SMTP sesions that use TLS as TLS is poorly supported across the internet. I know all my machines running an MTA don't have secure SMTP setup (I really don't like paying the $100 a year blood money to the damn certificate authorities).
I will agree that unix machines tend to be better administered, and are more likely to be patched better simply because the OS is less tied together and inter-dependant like windows is (and thus the huge service packs MS puts out). Take the latest openSSH patch for example. The changes were all back-ported to the version of OpenSSH running on a distribution+version. We also know exactly what changed (2 or 3 lines of code), and they're fairly simple changes. Vigourous testing of the patches isn't as pertinent as it is in the case of MS products, so patches will be applied more often.
AccountKiller
If you run a malicious attachment, it will be pretty much harmless to the machine. It may be able to wipe out your home directory, but that is about it.
/home is the most valuable part of the system! You can re-install Linux in under an hour, and recover /usr, /var, and pretty much everything else (with a slight exception of changed to /etc, but that's not important). If you lose /home, you are, simply put, FUCKED. Big time. Try reconstructing that data in under an hour. You can't. If you could back up *anything* on your system (assuming you had a choice), that choice should be /home.
That is the *biggest* crock of shit ever, but I hear it time and time again on Slashdot.
Why on earth would would you care if your applications got borked? It's the data that's important.
Swen runs as a program, a malicious program. That is what makes it a virus.
Swen does not rely on a vulnerability to spread. It does not require Microsoft Outlook to spread, (although outlook certainly helps), as it spreads just as well if you're using Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, Hotmail, Yahoo, WHATEVER!
All you must be doing is running an MS operating system.
There is no patch for stupidity.
Swen is a virus that relies on user stupidity to spread. The fact that this virus spreads to network shares is typical virus activity. If it copies itself to a startup folder, or modifies a registry string to launch the virus when a computer reboots, it is launching as an APPLICATION, a malicious application - which means virus to the slo folk and reporters that are reading this.
If Swen were to make a direct connection to a persons IP on port whatever, performs a buffer overflow which injects code into a running application thereby opening up a backdoor by which the worm can then infect the machine - THEN it would be a worm.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I said no operating system is secure, and that OS X, amongst others, isn't a perfect OS with a perfect trackrecord either. I proved that by demonstrating that Apple has had to release at least three security related bug fixes in the last few months.
Now sure, you could argue that having released those three fixes, there are no more bugs. OS X is an entirely secure OS. OS X can no longer be compromised. Steve Jobs has personally found out how those bugs occured, and has shot the programmers responsible. Not only shot them, but brutally and painfully tortured them too. OS X is hence bug free, it will never, ever, ever, again have a bug, still less a root level compromise bug.
Yeah right.
You've probably never used OS X, but actually OS X is pretty liberal on what you can do too. It's not as liberal as Windows, but permissions on, say, the equivalent of Program Files, and some of the major configuration files, are fairly open. I can install programs just by dragging them to a particular folder for the most part, but see below.Even so, it doesn't matter. All that's needed is either a root exploit, which is what two of the three above security updates dealt with (the other being a bug in the screensaver password box), or a social engineering exploit. And lo, it turns out the subject of this story is an example of both! Indeed, anyone fooled by the social engineering aspect of the current virus can and will run such a program as root, and do so easily, under OS X, given an equivalent that doesn't use a bug. Despite the lack of necessity, for the most part, of implementing it this way, many OS X installers can and do ask users for administrator rights to install the programs they're installing. This is exactly what you'd expect a "Security Path from {Insert Vendor Here}" to ask for. So a social engineering exploit along the lines of Swen would indeed work under OS X.
Anyone who believes they're secure because they run a non-Microsoft OS needs their head examining. Both OS X and Linux, the latter having a disparate and non-standardized update mechanism, the former being vulnerable to social engineering and being not 100% secure (because such a thing is not possible) are vulnerable, and it's the fact that they're not on the majority of desktops that keeps them "secure". Security by obscurity is not, as time has constantly told us, a sure-fire system. Rather than advise people to switch OS to avoid viri, it is better to encourage prevention.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Now click that "OK" button four thousand times.
Ho hum.
Your opinion quite frankly is not very worthwhile. First, losing a home directory under any OS is a _Very_ bad thing. You can't reinstall your home directory from a CD.
Second, every user does not run as Administrator out of the box in 'MS Windows Security'.
In XP this isn't true, in Server 2003 this isn't true, in Windows 2000 this isn't truee, in Windows NT this isn't true.
In MS-Dos this is true, in Windows 95 this is true. In windows 98 this is true, and in Windows ME this is true.
See a distinction? Ok, so lets consider you meant "in Windows ME". Fine, yes users run with full permission in ME. And those same users, if they were in Linux would not be using Linux. Because they couldn't figure out how to install it. If they did manage to get Linux on their box, and setup their mail client, I doubt they'd be much more secure. Why? Because _they_ are still the risk. They will execute the ".sh" file attached to the mail message. The script will alias some worthwhile commands and wait for the user to give it the root password. Or, it may just ask them, after all, the users ARE the WEAK link. So why not just pop up an important looking window (or console prompt) and say something like "fsck detected faulty partition data on ext2/blah/bah/bah at offest 00345678 code word DELTA. Please enter root password so that kernel.bot may correct this problem".
Get my point? It _IS_ the "dumb" user. Switching them to a different operating system won't protect them (unless of course you _Don't_ give them root access or password, and then that would be a trusted environment and they wouldn't be running Windows ME, they'dbe running win2k or XP or 2003 or Linux or BSD or some other securable operating system).
hope that helps,
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
It's because it's too hard to get anything done on a Windows box as a normal user.
Btw, 'run-as' is little more than a half-assed ripoff of 'su'. Try to install a program sometime using 'run-as'. Whose permissions does the installer use? Where do the registry settings go? Why doesn't anything work?
I, and many others, are tired of fighting with half-completed MS 'features' that don't live up to the hype. Maybe, one day, Windows will have finally managed to implement all of the useful features that were designed into the UNIX and Mac OSes. Then I might consider using it. At MS' current rate of ignoring basic functionality in lieu of marketing buzzwords, though, that day will never come.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Like I said, 2.5 years. Somebody here isn't doing their job and blaming their problems on Microsoft.