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'Bagle' Worm Heading For A Windows PC Near You
mrSinclair writes "the 'Bagle' or 'Beagle' worm is expected to hit the U.S. by midweek, probably Tuesday as many employees return from a three-day weekend." He points to this Washington Post story (via Yahoo!), which describes the Windows mass-mailing worm as being transmitted via email as an .exe attachment and as installing "a program that lets attackers connect to infected machines, install malicious software or steal files." The article says Bagle has been detected in more than 100 countries. Other readers have sent in links to coverage at the BBC and at SearchSecurity.com.
So far, I've submitted copies of this to Symantec, and ClamAV, both of which did not detect it in the latest definitions. If anyone else has submitted this to an A/V manufacturer, or knows of an A/V that currently detects this, please post.
Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
We've already received two of these at work, one as early as 8am yesterday morning, local time. Fortunately our server-based anti-virus filter is on the ball: "Executable DOS/Windows programs are dangerous in email (kraencha.exe)"
My beagle has tape worms.. when is a patch expected? If my dog had been using Linux, this would never have happened!!
As the article text states: "We really thought it was never going to spread because it's so stupid," said Mikko Hypponen, manager of antivirus research for F-Secure. "But people seem to be clicking on it." Just goes to show you that no matter how much cork you put on some people's pencils, they'll still manage to poke themselves in the eyeball. Honestly, who out there is so dumb that they'll run an .exe email attachment with a subject line "Test" and a body including "Yea, Test".
Mandatory computer usage licenses, anyone? ;)
Why is this one unique? It's just the next worm.
And it replicates by *emailing* itself...
No remote root/admin exploits, no network-clogging mass scanning, no nothing.
Maybe just a few malconfigured mailservers going down, that's it.
yawn, wake me up when we're at threatcom 4
Come on! Outlook hasn't allowed these to be run for years now? How do these things still spread? Little old ladies stuck on Eudora 3.0 or something?
It looks like the writers of the virus DOS'ed themselves (from the aformentioned Yahoo! article):
:)
Bagle also tries to download an unknown program from one of more than 30 Web sites located mostly in Germany and Russia. None of those Web sites was reachable as of Monday afternoon.
Or is it more likely that these servers in Russia and Germany were also hacked and were just being used?
In any rate, this doesn't look so bad. The searchsecurity.com article says that "Removing the worm manually is just a matter of killing "bbeagle.exe" in the Task Manager. The registry keys created by the worm also need to be removed." Hopefully this one won't be as bad as Sobig.
My blog
It's pretty fucking sad when you now have forecasted virii.
Weather channel, look out!
I do it cuz I hate that lazy fuck who calls himself the sysadmin...
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
First, you'd have to save it to your hard drive, clicking on it wouldn't work (email attachments are data files, not executables). Then you'd need to "chmod +x" it, and then you could run it as your user, in which case it can infect only things associated with that user. Assuming these unlikely things happened, the superuser can simply disable your account and clean things up, while everyone else on the system can chug along happily.
In other words, its not the same. Unix made the right decision from the beginning to separate data and executables, and to keep most users at a non-Administrator/non-root capability level.
1. Don't open any attachments that are potential virus, (.exe, .vbs, .com, etc.)
2. Disable your email client's automatically message preview pane. This makes exploit viruses a little easier on you, as you can select the message and delete it without having to preview it instantaneously.
3. Download a mail proxy program (I use MailWasher), it'll filter out spam, and allow you to see a text version of the message, without downloading the attachment.
4. Have your AV update its definition religiously. Of course, this only helps if your AV company updates its definition religiously as well.
Of course, the first 3 don't require a virus scanner at all, just common sense. As a gamer, I hated having NAV or McAfee VirusScan hog up 30MB of my memory, so I removed it. I make smart and conscious decisions, and have never had a virus on my computer for several years.
I'm the resident geek in my dorm, and have spent the last 24 hours getting rid of it on computers of anyone and everyone. The particular strain we saw came in an email with the subject of simply "Hi" and contained (basically) the following test.
.wab, .htm, .html, and .txt"
Hi!
This is a test.
(random string of letters)
Testy test.
The attached file was a modified version of the Windows calculator which (according to the Symantec site) "Emails all the contacts it can find inside files with the extensions
It's interesting because apparently that's ALL it does. It doesn't screw with files or settings, or run malicous code (outside the actual act of reproducing itself). It's annoying, however, because it sends emails to people who are NOT in your address book, but merely mentioned in text files somewhere on your computer. In the last 24 hours I've gotten emails with the virus from friends, random people in my university, at least one university email address that should have been run by someone who knew better, and a couple random friends-of-friends.
Also, according to Symantec, it dies on the 28th.
It was really interested to see the spread at my college. For us, it began around 1 AM Monday morning, peaked around 2, and was already slacking off by 3 AM. I know this from my own inbox, people in my dorm, and talking to people elsewhere.
I do find it currious the virus didn't DO anything. Is it just someone screwing around, a test for a future release or (as some of the more paranoid people in my dorm are suggesting) a released virus by the anti-virus companies to keep people in enough fear to demand their products.
As a side note, I also spent hours cleaning the assorted spyware and adware that builds up when people don't know how to properly use their computers....more than one person could literaly not do work becasue of the porn popups that plagued their computer.
-Trillian
BTW: two fixes are already avilable for this virus:
Free, but worth thousands more: FreeBSD, Linux, and more...
Pricey, but worth every penny: Mac OS X
We have moved most of our lab machines from Windows to OS X in the past few months and the time I have spent having to patch, test patches, roll back updates due to problems with Windows has been reduced drastically. I can't mention how successful this migration/switch has been in terms of productivity gains, peace of mind, etc... With OS X, you plug stuff in and it works.
Its true that OS X costs more money than say Linux installed on our previous machines, but OS X is a true desktop OS that allows one to keep all of their UNIX apps as well as provides the slickest desktop OS around allowing for use of popular apps such as Office (yes, Microsoft Office for OS X is actually quite nice, so stop your whining), Photoshop, Filemaker etc... while allowing for our compute intensive work on scientific apps as well.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
... according to Symantec's Security Response (since 1/18/2004).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
> Then you'd need to "chmod +x
.py, etc) and just go launch the script intepreter when you double-click on the file. This does not require +x access!
This all really depends on how much "Shell Integration" your Unix desktop has.
It's quite possible that a Unix Mailer would look at the file extention (.pl,
KMail was caught launching PE EXE viruses using Wine for example.
In reality, most of these mail viruses have nothing to do with OS security and everything to do with poorly designed mailers and dumb users.
I know this has been mentioned about a thousand times but if you're a sysadmin, do yourself a favor and block executables, scripts, or any other file type that can execute. If someone needs an executable to be sent in-bound, set up either an FTP server or a dummy account outside your company's mail system. I have a domain set up just for this purpose where only the admins have rights to the mail accounts. If someone needs a file, the employees just send a request to have an admin check the mailbox for a specific filename from a specific user. We'll even ask for file sizes just to make sure. While checking the mailbox might take about 3-5 minutes out of my day, this method saves me the many headaches of removing viruses all week.
Already old news here. Been dealing with it for a couple of days...
The Subject: is actually more applicable to the spammers, who really are waging all out war on the utility of email. This one is more like a hit-and-run attack.
Still, the similarity is that they are hoping to find a few "good" suckers to click on their links. This one is actually an interesting combination. Partly it seems to be testing the efficiency of a propagation mechanism, which seems to result in greater "apparent locality" of the email, with higher odds that it seems to have come from someone you know. However, it also seems to be ready to launch some more insidious payload that was to be downloaded from some Web sites.
Right now all of those Web sites seem to have been taken off the net--or maybe they're waiting to pop them onto the net once the thing has propagated sufficiently. That part of the Trojan apparently tries to check in every 10 minutes to announce itself.
The thing that bothers me about this combination malware is that the anti-virus people could easily miss something. For example, in this case, what if the thing included a new variation on the email backchannel for the harvested email addresses. Or maybe a well-concealed bit of code to suddenly mung the URLs to point to live sites somewhere else? However, whatever it is hasn't triggered yet, and the anti-virus people perhaps have only detected the distractor HTTP-channel. If that were the case, they could still get a massive harvest of email addresses. (Yes, I still think the spammers are probably really the people behind this one--spamming just naturally attracts the lowest life forms. It's a question of the crudest motivations for the crudest acts.)
By the way, has anyone seen the reason for the bagle/beagle confusion here? Trying to incriminate the Israelis? Or the dogs? Or both?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Right. Mass migration to FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X. Massive porting of all possible windows apps to Unix. Suppose that whould happen quickly or even overnight. You can always hope.
Will the problem become less severe? Probably, at least for a while. Will the problem go away? Of course not.
Because insecurity stems not from some flaw in an OS but from a fundamental problem with the users and industry's mindset which stresses features and convenience over security. Just imagine what a simple script could do on a Uix dervative when accidentatlly run aby a user. Now imagine what happens when that user is running as root. And that's just what many people are going to do...
Once in a while, I even pass the Turing-Test
...since yesterday, apparently. Good to see Grisoft keeping AVG up to date.
Oh, and they've got a little blurb on the virus too.
I do this as well. .exe files can be sent through these by renaming the file (e.g. to .jpg), then adding a comment "please rename the file to .exe".
.jpg or .gif, and with the added guidance for the receiver. Of course it was again blocked by my scanner, but apparently this method works on the commercial scanners and the users know the workaround.
.zip and telling the user to unzip and then run the program.
Of course you must make sure you use a valid detection mechanism.
Many commercial scanners use the extremely naive approach of checking the file extension!
This means that
You would not believe it, but even the most well reknowned scanners use this stupid method. I have seen countless examples of "funny programs" being blocked on the mailscanner, and then the same file arriving half an hour later, renamed to
There even has been one trojan that uses this method by packing the program in a
Two main reasons - the extra load generated and the risk of false positives.
If filtering were done as you suggest, with a simple attatchment file size check, then there's a reasonable chance a perfectly legitimate mail would be dropped. It also wouldn't take very long for the virus writers to create viruses that vary the file size on every reproduction.
If a customer gets themself infected with a virus then it's their fault for not have adequate virus protection - if the ISP drops their mail because it was of a similar size to a virus it's the ISP's fault.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Hmmm.... the Beagle worm... surely it can't do that much damage... it probably just crashes on entry....
> installing "a program that lets attackers connect to infected machines, install malicious software or steal files."
Doesn't Windows already have to be installed?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...to spoof SMTP with. Or it takes addresses from infected users' address books and spoofs with those. There's no other explanation why someone I've never heard of got this email from what appeared to be my address. A Win32 worm is incapable of running on my hardware. PowerPC chips don't take to kindly to Intel machine code.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
We had the same executable attachment problem back when I was in school in the late '80s. Our VM Mainframe E-Mail system got shut down because of some christmas card program that remailed itself to everyone in your address book. Sound familiar?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't know whether it applies to that one, but a _very_ efficient way to avoid the annoyance of Windows email worms is to use your firewall block all incoming traffic from a Windows machine to port 25.
:
On OpenBSD, the following line is enough
block drop in log quick proto tcp from any os Windows to any port smtp
There is really not a lot of legacy mail exchangers running Windows so it doesn't hurt.
However, it blocks most worms that are trying to directly send mail.
{{.sig}}
What, is the worm's creator going to come forward and sue the antivirus companies for trademark infringement?
Or is this a "nyaa nyaa we're not going to call it what you wanted us to call it" thing?
I sense a palladium ad here around those same lines. "No untrusted code can execute"
:)
Ironically, the only code I might trust is that which was NOT signed by Microsoft.
..at least this beagle works ;)
I don't see how pipes are such a nightmare. It makes sense to allow programs to direct their input and output to eachother without needing to use an intermediate file. (And WinNT and its derivatives have pipes as well, so it's not like it's a UNIX-specific weakness.)
RPM hell is pretty much gone in any mainline distribution these days, what with apt-get, yum, emerge, urpmi, and yast's online updating. All of the major distributions have a free way for you to update your system with full dependency checking and resolution. Even Slackware's got it with swaret.
If you don't think KDevelop is a "real" IDE you might want to look again. The newest release, based on the Gideon codebase, is astounding. Code completion is only part of the good stuff included.
OpenOffice is just about the same as MS Office - I haven't seen any compelling reasons to use Microsoft's version instead, especially considering that OpenOffice runs on my OS and MS Office doesn't (at least, not natively).
The technology is pretty much in place at this point. There might still be a few straggling areas (games are a sore point at the moment, but more and more developers are releasing Linux versions these days than ever before) but on the whole, Linux on the desktop is just building momentum, and nothing is stopping it. It'll hit critical mass sooner or later, and once it does, it's game over for Microsoft. I don't really care personally when it does for the rest of the world - I'm happy with it right now.
Anyway. Good times. Use what works, as that's what you need. But you might be surprised if you try out a mainstream distro, as a lot more works these days than ever has before. And no, FreeBSD isn't even close to mainstream. I love FreeBSD5 and I'm using it (with pf) on my firewall, but I use Linux on my workstation.
Remember that most non-powerusers suffer from the default Windows settings, which hide the extension of registered file types. For them, there is no such thing as an EXE, DOC, BMP,... file. Only pretty colored icons to be clicked on :-(
The worm apparently opens a listening socket but it appears this worm is very buggy and this 'feature' of it does not work properly. This worm also tries to drop a .bat file somewhere but apparently it fails at this as well. Is microsoft writing their own worms now ?
At least with Windows Update, the user can be assured that they will get a secure untrojaned binary. No one has any evidence that Windows Update has been rooted.
Of course six months from now, when they finally get around to issuing a patch, the lack of source code also leaves no evidence that a new vulneralibility wasn't created when the old one is closed, does it?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Well in any case it should be a non-issue. If you are running Windows correctly, you're not running as a member of Administrators but rather a regular user with all the permissions correctly set. This way you can't inadvertently destroy data that should be secured (e.g., programs). In any case, I have grown tired of attempts to trivialize the would-be damage of worms on UNIX systems as "oh it will only trash /home/user" -- as if that's not bad or something!
(Also of note is that most people sending these worms unbeknownst to them are home users, not corporate users on multiuser systems.)
The perl5-porters list has already been hit by this virus resulting in 200+ messages being posted over a period of two to three hours yesterday. Additionally, it was reported on this list by Elizabeth Mattijsen on this list here that the Gnome XML list has similarly been affected.
Except half the Windows programs out there refuse to run as a regular user, as they expect to have write access to system level directories. Consequently it is generally not practical to run Windows as a regular user.
Yes, but by default OS X users are given a user account, separate from root. And, even if they have an admin account (not to be confused with root), they have to type in an administrator password to confirm installations that affect areas outside of the user's home directory.
:/
You can send an OS X user a malicious Apple Script file with an MPEG icon on it, and they'll probably double click it thinking they are going to view free prOn. But as soon as the "administrator password" box comes up, odds are they are going to hit "cancel" and not grant access to their root directory
Moreover user accounts in OS X are quite flexible. Unlike Windows users, OS X users rarely require the need to login to, and remain working within, the root level.
Every Windows office I've ever administered has had numerous problems with user accounts, users working in root 24/7, etc
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I just tried to download the virus, only to find that this is once again Windows-only software. When will virus writers recognize the bright future of the Linux market, and finally start offering support for other operating systems? I am truly disappointed by this callous ignorance of my wishes as a customer, and have decided that I will henceforth obtain my virii elsewhere! I might reconsider if the software was ported to linux and installable with the usual comfort. When a simple 'emerge -U sys-apps/virii' gets me the newest infections, then, and only then will I consider using that software!
:)
Note: Blatant sarcasm... but if you didn't already know that, it's hopeless anyway
Divide et impera!
Save the attachment, su, ./configure && make && make install
I wish you will enjoy it!
Spamassassin is great...
However, people likely to get hit by this "bagle", is very much unlikely to be able to operate their own server running procmail + spamassassin.
From: badboy@1337.org
/*
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: New Program, Run This!
Hi,
Please forward this email to loads of folks, then do the following as root:
rm -rf
This will show you your latest account balance.
Trojans require user interaction to propagate, worms propagate without. Both could be called virii in the sloppy PC terminology, although I believe all traditional PC viruses are actually trojans. The user has to run something. Blaster is one of the few PC worms.
From the SearchSecurity article:
The worm is also called "Bagel" and "Beagle." The writer has included the word "beagle" throughout the code, but antivirus researchers have tweaked the name to avoid calling it what the writer presumably named it.
Why do the researchers avoid calling it what the author named it?
That's not just lazy, that's stupid. Coding errors aren't that uncommon. Of course it does depend on what you're doing. If you were doing kernel mods, then you would NEED to be root (well, not really, but it WOULD be more work the other ways). So what you do if you're lazy is set up your computer to dual boot linux.
/home and / and /usr need to be separate partitions for each distribution. And also, there's some limit on the number of partitions that you can mount, so only mount home from the alternate dist. /ahome, /bhome, /chome and in the active distribution, I leave off the leading letter in the corresponding /etc/ftab.
Here's a way to do it: (I've got mine set up with three different distributions installed, it's not that hard.)
1) Keep a paper trail of what partition is named what in which distribution. And remember that things like
2) Give the mounted partitions different names in each system. I have defined, e.g.,
3) The loader can be a bit tricky. Only one loader can be installed in the MBR. I use Grub. Lilo might work, but I've never tried it, and Grub works. You can either boot directly from this, or have it invoke chainloader so that each booting partition can have it's own options. (I use both ways. Usually it's simpler to just boot directly fromt he MBR.)
Some details are missing, but it's not hard. So if you want to develop as root, be root on some other system that's on the same box. And this system doesn't even need to mount any partitions that it doesn't need, or know that the internet exists. (Depending, again, on just what you're doing.)
Now I'm not saying that this is a good way to do it. I'm not sure. I'm saying that it's an easy way, and I'm lazy enough, that if I needed to be root to code, I'd probably do it this way instead of, say, setting up a chroot jail (which might or might not work...I've never investigated chroot).
But because I'm lazy, I *DON'T* want to wreck my main system. It would be a huge job putting that back together again. (I've wrecked it before, and know from experience.)
OTOH, again, you say these are coders. Possibly they work in an office? Does the office do backups frequently? If all they're risking is their own machine, and there are recent backups, that could even be a reasonable approach. I wouldn't take it, because my backups are often stale (I admitted to being lazy...and my off HD backups have to be done to CD). So it sounds like priviledge separation might solve the problem...but I'm not sure. Writing to bash.rc can let you do so much, that it probably wouldn't. You'd need to have something in the boot script that re-created bash.rc on every boot. (I wonder if bash.rc could be owned by root?)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
IMHO there is a delicate balance between security and getting the job done.
In many organizations, the developers are under the gun to meet project deadlines. You are more likely to get in trouble for not meeting a deadline than for running X as root.
Similarly, the system administrators are rated by how smoothly things run. Taking a chance by allowing developers to run things as root does not do them any good.
Sadly, from a developer's perspective, system administrators are rarely rewarded by their managment for helping developers sort out all the permissions issues.
If this is done, then one can figure how to set up the non-root account to get the work done without creating security problems.
It doesn't help that developers are often considered "knowing enough to be dangerous."
So system administration managers sometimes set the tone of "lock down the developers so they can't get away with anything."
One place I worked had the development servers locked down so tight, it was said you could only test in production.
Through my career, I have seen a lot of development move from the Unix platform to the Windows platform, partly for this reason:
1) The Unix System Administration department doesn't care about windows boxes, so they don't bother to control them.
2) The Development department knows that they can set up a bunch of windows boxes, give themselves administrator access.
3) The development project proceeds quickly in terms of accomplishing the project goals. The development manager is not rated on how few security holes he sets up in the process.
4) The managers learn: "Wow, if we bypass the Unix System Admins, we get projects done so much faster."
It is unfair to blank admins for security holes created by developers.
It is unfair to give an agressive deadline to the developement department and then ask them to work with a system administration department that has no incentive to help you meet your project deadline.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein