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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. "
Thats one hell of a virus.
I suggest all Windows users go to http://www.knoppix.net/ and burn the CD.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It's been flooding my mailbox for more than a day now. Grr...
of those machines seem to ahve sent it to me :(
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
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.
That's kind of funny, although it seems that this virus requires user interaction in order to spread, so we can't really blame M$ for this one :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
At work, they have duped over 5 of my collegues...even AFTER the email went out saying that it was going around. Well, Make an OS that any idiot can use, and only idiots will use it, I guess...
My problem with all these worms is that it doesn't do anything after it propogates, so no one will really care except bandwidth-concious IT people. It should send itself out, then erase all the FAT tables on a hard drive.
Or deltree the c:\winnt or c:\windows directory (or both).
That would REALLY piss people off, who would demand that they do something to make sure that not happen again...like...I dunno...Linux or OSX?
Just a thought...
The fake update has made it to Windows Update itself. Here is the name: "Recommended Update for Windows Rights Management client 1.0."
Do not download, it's only there to own your system.
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
On the bright side, deliveries of unrelated spam seem to have fallen due to the worm's load on the internet :-)
I was happy to get this e-mail from Microsoft so I could apply a cumulative patch. I'm usually so bad about patching my system in time, but this time they took the trouble to remind me personally!
No more worries for me!
Five of'em in one day. Of course, the rest will go into the trash automatically, but it was an interesting experience finally catching a taste of the "commoner" internet.
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
So, I have recieved a number of these (thank goodness I am running OS X) and it appears that the "notification" also contains html. So, examining the html, it appears that it actually references microsoft.com.
If I were microsoft, it appears there is a simple way to defeat this by inserting html in the referenced source that warns recipients of this sort of thing.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
....because they're noticed too quickly. If you destroy your host immediately you're not going to propogate too far, now are you?
Yes, you could make it a little more complex with time-outs or a way to select certain targets as hosts for more sending and others to destroy, but it wouldn't last and last like some of the recent worms, because it's effects would be so noticeable.
This type of trojan has been around for a while. I've been getting fake MS e-mails for almost a year now. Official Microsoft statement that we give people on the phone "Microsoft never sends you files via e-mail unless you are on the phone with support personel and they specifically say they are e-mailing you something" 99.99999999% of the time, if MS e-mails you it will only direct you to their site to READ about the purpose of the patch and then download it. Also all MS security bulletins are digitally signed.
Network Assocaites has some screenshots of the installer http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_100662.htm
It's a very good idea these days to just reject all executable attachments at "the gates" so to speak. I use postfix 1.1 so I added:
/etc/main.cf where the file referenced came from here:
c ks
body_checks = pcre:/etc/postfix/mime_header_checks
to
http://www.securitysage.com/files/mime_header_che
but there are many regular expression filters like this one. Note, with 2.x you need to use the 'mime_header_checks' directive rather than 'body_checks'.
If you want to send someone an executable, send it to them in a zip or tar.gz.
Um no. You could defend against the RPC worm a variety of ways.
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.
The only defense is to stay vigilant and be smart about computers. Just because someone is using linux doesn't make it secure. No matter what Operating System you are on, you have to be somewhat proactive in protecting your computer.
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.
I'm sure there is an equilvent fix for sendmail. If you are running MS Exchange, the best way to fix your server is by taking a knife to its network cable.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Some guy tracked the hidden counter inside the virus and posted the numbers: http://smharr4.dnsalias.net/security/index.html Pretty neat.
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
Disable DCOM?.
> And on another issue, where's the button in Windows Update that says, "I don't
> want to add this patch ever, so stop bothering me!"?
On the windows update page after it scans for files to download, on the left hand side is a link called "Personalize windows update"
In there it lists all patches not yet installed but listed.
Turn off the checkbox for any of them you dont want to see.
Have fun.
Has Linux based Virus scanner that can update itself to scan hard drives for known viruses. That way if Windows goes Wonky, boot to Knoppix and do a virus scan to see if you got infected.
That way you won't risk running an infected machine on the Internet and infect others.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
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.
No, it's not just you. Same here. Me too!!! I open every e-mail and run every attached executable, even if I don't know who it is from. And I've never had my computer affected with any virus or worm or trojan or whatever. Sure it crashes now and then, but all computers do, and sometimes I can't find my files... I probably didn't save them right in the first place or forgot where I put them. When it all gets really bad, the kid next door comes and fiddles with it, re-installs my system.. or something like that.. but that's just normal too.. windows has always been like this for me. And it's the best OS around, so thank god I don't have something worse.. like one of those hobby play operating systems!
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 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?
Greetings. You have been infected with GNU/Swen, a worm brought to you by members of the linux community. In order to get this worm to infect your system properly, you will need to use wget to download gnuswen-config-2.4.6 from one of the usual mirrors. Be careful; this version of the worm is not compatible with versions of gnuswen-config prior to 2.4.4. After you have downloaded the config tools and issued the usual incantations (./config, make, make install), you can configure the worm from any directory simply by typing sudo gnuswen-config -ort [your login id] [full path to your email client]. If you have any questions, be sure to RTFM, the docs are installed at /usr/share/info/gnuswen and all your config files are stored at ~/.gnuswen.
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!"
If you run an app and it does that, then it is a "trojan". No operating system will ever be free of trojans.
But trojans have trouble spreading themselves. Anyone can write a Linux trojan (cd ~ ; rm -R), but it will not spread far. While you may think that the damage is bad because it happened to your machine, you represent less than 1/10,000,000'th of the total.
More people will have lost data because of hard drive failure than lose data because of Linux viruses or trojans.
Yes, if a hole is found in pine or mutt or Evolution that allows email viruses such as you describe is found, then email viruses such as you describe can be written for that application.
But an exploit for pine would not affect someone running mutt or Evolution.
Linux has a better designed security system than Windows does.
A hole in one application will only affect those people running that application and it will have to find some way of spreading to those people.
Without the means of spreading, the virus will be contained.
Without the ability to infect machines it has contact with, the virus will be contained.
Which is why there aren't any Linux viruses in the wild. Not because people aren't writing them. But because they cannot spread the infection.
The other day I got a Linux email virus. It was this perfectly innocent looking message, with the subject line reading "Important!". So I opened it, and inside I found the following:
"This is an email virus for Linux users. It works on the honor system. Upon receipt of this message, you should manually forward it to everyone in your address book, then login as root and randomly delete a bunch of files. Thank you!"
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
After installing any system it's an excellent idea to use Norton Ghost (free with Soyo and possibly other MBs) to image the system. Then, if anything bad happens or if you just want to move the OS to a new drive, you just blast it over and 30 minutes later or less you're up and running as though nothing changed.
My 2000 system was on an old 2GB drive that was about to fail and with ghost I was up and running much faster on a 13GB drive in less than an hour. I also have an image of my web-server's OS/app drive in case it ever fails.
Knoppix and what I do is basically what prebuilt system manufacturers have been doing for years. It's just that HP, et al, add a lot of crap to the image.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
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
Actually the latest Outlook doesn't even allow you to save an .exe unless you turn the filtering off (setting in the registry).
GET http://ww2.fce.vutbr.cz/bin/counter.gif/link=bacil lus&width=6&set=cnt006 HTTP/
1.0
ww2.fce.vutbr.cz
The first was a counter. At the time I checked it had well over a million hits and was going up FAST. At the time I'd been hit by about 20 copies of the virus. The next morning the counter was taken down and replaced with a warning. At that time I'd been "hit" over 70 times by the virus.
There seems to be variations to the emails that contain the virus. The main one is a 160K email that contains an attachmentwith a content type of Application/X-MSDOWNLOAD. The second is about 148K is size and the attachment has the content type of Audio/X-WAV. There are some emails that are 16K in size but the attachment is a zero length file. I've also been getting emails claiming to be "bounces" from Yahoo and other ISP's saying I'm trying to send a virus infected email to someone. But the Received lines show the the email is not from Yahoo. So far I've received over 170 of these damn things.
Then there are all of the real ISP's who are not helping the problem. I keep getting warnings claiming that someone I don't know tried to send me an email with a virus. Thank you, but your anti-virus software just sent out a useless email and just accomplished one of the goals of swen, to clog up email servers. Send an email to the moron who is currently infected and stop sending out thousands of emails telling everyone else about it.
This may sound harsh, but I'm really hoping the next big Microsoft worm or virus will disable the infected comupters.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
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.
-install XP -ok
-reboot
-install SP1 and after patch -ok
-reboot
-install ATI all in wonder drivers -ok
-reboot
computer farked to death...
so:
-install XP -ok
-reboot
-setup the video driver to "standard vga adapter"
-install ATI All in Wonder drivers (ati version not microsoft)
-install SP1 and after patch -ok
-reboot
-update ATI all in wonder drivers -ok
-reboot
-install battlefield 1942
-update battelfield
-install road to rome
-update road to rome
-install Thrustmaster tactical board driver
-reboot
-computer screwed...
go back to line one, changed order advitam eternam...
Maybe one day I will be able to play this game... seemed to be nice on the pictures of the box...
Actually i'm having a lot of fun with the GBA... insert cartdrigde... oups, remove cartdridge flip over and insert cartdridge in the good direction, turn on, play... eat chips, drink coke, and watch tv at the same time...
By the way, having an uptime of six weeks on an XP box means you didn't patch it for 6 weeks, which is between irresponsability and plain stupidity... have fun while you can, stop trolling and remove your keyboard from the TV, you're not funny anymore.
2.) Using *any* software firewall. Even WinXP's own firewall. ZoneAlarm is trash in my opinion. But it isn't your only protection.
Agreed. I have found that Kerio Personal Firewall has been great. It's also free for non-commercial use.. good stuff. Everyone should use a firewall as it really would protect them from just about every one of these worms.
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"