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More MyDoom Gloom
fudgefactor7 writes "Hot on the heels of the last virus, Mydoom.b is on the loose. According to Computerworld, this variant has a larger payload and targets Microsoft's Web site for a distributed denial-of-service attack on Feb. 1, instead of The SCO Group Inc. Patch those systems and keep your A-V up to date. Definitions are available currently."
decaying writes "With the amount of virus-laden emails flying about due to the latest virus, Australian ISP Optus have started selectively blocking port 25 outbound. Optus say they are acting in accordance with their "Terms of use", quoting that they reserve the right to restrict access to any TCP/IP port. The only option is to use Optus' SMTP server and nothing else. Community site Whirlpool has an on-going discussion about the issue."
carnun writes "Just another link on MyDoom. Apparently the FBI are also getting in on the act. Interesting to see such a fast response." And to me, the most interesting one: Zeriel writes "After much discussion on a mailing list discussing trojan horses, some people have reached the conclusion that MyDoom doesn't accomplish its stated goal of DDOSing SCO at all! Choice quote from the analysis: "I have the new critter in a test environment where we conducted a preliminary and rudimentary functionality and threat analysis...I have played with the date, etc, but still no activity directed toward www.sco.com." The link also includes disassembly and analysis of the worm code."
It's entirely possible that the authors of this virus targeted SCO, simply to make it appear that Linux zealots were responsible...to throw off the law enforcement officials who might look for the culprit in the Linux community.
While I despise these worms, you've got to admit that some of these more recent ones are pretty ingenious:
Blaster - The only way to fix it is to grab stuff from Microsoft? Have it DDOS Windows Update.
MyDoom - Hate SCO, Love Linux? Target Microsoft systems and leave Linux machines alone. Have it DDOS SCO.
I'm looking for a serious apology (or at least a retraction) for the 'alleged' link between this ugly little nasty and Open Source / Linux users."
Of note: Darl McBride was on local (Utah) television last night with a stinging quote. "What we are seeing here is the dark side of the open source movement" or something very close to that. I thought, no dude, you have it all backwards. SCO is the dark side of the open source movement.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
It was covered last week.
Basically, to limit the spread of a worm on a network such as the internet, we can only diversify to make sure not all machines go down.
Here's a presentation (sorry I could only find a PowerPoint version) that was made by Jonathan Wignall at DefCon last year about this topic. Same conclusion, diversifying is the necessary to combat worms.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
The B variant targets both Microsoft and SCO.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
place where nobody gives a wet slap
Anyone care to clarify what a wet slap is?
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
.. would TURN OFF those blasted "Your mail has a virus!" auto-replies. They accomplish nothing but the generation of yet more useless traffic.
Trolling is a art,
I have the new critter in a test environment where we conducted a preliminary and rudimentary functionality and threat analysis...I have played with the date, etc, but still no activity directed toward www.sco.com." The link also includes disassembly and analysis of the worm code."
So basically, SCO being down right now is Yet Another Big Lie from SCO. Nice to see them shown up as spreaders of misinformation yet again. I'm sure the FBI will love to hear their excuses as to why they're pretending to be down, especially if they're attempting to blame the worm. Fascinating
It is likely that this virus has been assembled for the purpose of defaming the Linux developers by spammers, SCO, or others. Your behavior will influence whether or not it succeeds in this mission.
Thus, I urge all persons who have sympathy for Free Software, Open Source, and Linux:
Remember that your actions count. You are ambassadors of our community.
Bruce Perens.
... here at Virginia Tech, the virus has had our pop/smtp servers down since sometime last night. Apparently it infected our financial aid listserv, which caters to 51,000 email addresses, most of them in the vt.edu domain. Not to mention 8000 of the not-so-savvy on-campus undergrads whose systems have been infected. In the 4+ years I've been here, this is the longest downtime for our email system yet, even considering the downtime a couple routine server rebuilds caused. I'm sure other institutions, agencies, and businesses are experiences unheard-of downtimes as well.
May the threads progress competently.
What the hell would it matter anyway? Evil spammers probably also use toothpaste. Does that make everyone who uses toothpaste evil?
The fallacious logic here astounds me. Wait, no it doesn't.
A report covering F-Secure's work on the virus reveals this interesting comment imbedded in the virus:
Buried in its programming code -- and only readable after it has been decrypted -- was also the message "Andy; I'm just doing my job, nothing personal, sorry" from the creator
My tinfoil hat says it's some poor guy at SCO!
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Not to mention all of the scared users calling the helpdesk insisting that they are infected.
"Dude, you are using PINE! You are NOT infected!!!"
I've said it a thousand times.
If it weren't for /., I'd have never noticed.
Pretty Pictures!
Also, you forgot to make an RIAA variant, dumbass!
This was some criminal capitalizing on the Hot topic of the Linux vs SCO debate. If this worm has targeted the whiteshouse.gov site you've have the same idiots saying terrorists did it. These criminals just used Linux as a scapegoat. I try to avoid reading articles about this worm because I just can't stomach reading all these posts about how the OSS community should "tread lightly" etc. Get a clue people.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Here's a presentation (sorry I could only find a PowerPoint version) that was made by Jonathan Wignall at DefCon last year about this topic. Same conclusion, diversifying is the necessary to combat worms.
How ironic is that? Someone who allegedly knows something about network security, who insists on providing presentations in a format which:
Fine, use PowerPoint for the presentation. But damn well save the slides as HTML, Acrobat, plain text, etc. for public downloading and consumption.
At my university, the only department which saved all lecture notes, etc in proprietary format (and continues to do so!) was the very one which should know better: Systems and Computer Engineering. It's really pathetic.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"It's entirely possible that the authors of this virus targeted SCO, simply to make it appear that Linux zealots were responsible..."
I wouldn't rule out Romulan involvement.
"Derp de derp."
p.s. yes, it's an old joke, but still, you know you laughed....
Disgruntled SCO Employee: This company is going down the tubes. If I stay here much longer I'll never find work again! I quit! *slam*
Darl McBride: Damn! We just lost our last programmer! What are we going to do now?
Grand Vizier: *rubbing hands together* Well, now I suggest we go to the very salt of the earth...To the spammers!
McBride: Wha? What the hell are you talking about?
Mr. Burns: Obviously our only course of action is to utilize the dark side of the force. We must make those young linux whippersnappers look bad by making a virus that seems to target our own servers!
McBride: Brilliant! We'll make it look like those linux communists are trying to destroy our legitimate business! Make it so!
Mr. Burns: Eeeexcellent.....
Thus goes the story I heard from a passing lunatic...
No patching would have prevented this worm. Look, when MyDoom comes in as a zip file the user has to open it once to access the actual payload. When you open the thing in WinZip it shows up as [random].[doc or whatever] but has the wrong icon. WinZip then identifies it as a pif file and in the screen says DOS executable. After all that, the user has to execute it again to deliver the actual payload.
MyDoom has nothing to do with bad sysadmins. Nada! At work we have the desktops locked down and Outlook is setup to not permit autoexecute. Most executable attachments are dropped at the mailserver. The reason I say most is because we do allow Word documents and the like because surprise, surprise we have to actually run a business. Our signature files are updated daily and if a new virus comes out I do my job to make sure we're at the proper rev and run a manual update if we're not. The one thing I can't do is play Big Brother to a 1000+ employees scattered over the state 365/7 and smack them everytime they try to open some random shiny thing.
And more importantly, how can a sysadmin stop some random Joe User on a home cable connection from executing the stupid worm or patching his damn system?
That soundbite of yours starts getting a little hollow now doesn't it?
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Didn't blaster target the wrong address for Windows Update?
DDOS a website that probably gets about 10 interested visitors a day anyway?
Personally I'm surprised at the lack of damage these things do. Our systems and people are apparently wide open to these things. Blaster and MyDoom should be viewed as warning shots. It's only going to be a matter of time before someone writes something that infects, spends 2-8 hours propagating itself and then nukes the system it's living on, causing real widespread damage rather than minor annoyances.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Sophos has intercepted a new trojan called Troj/Stawin-A that installs a keystroke logger, captures data related to financial institutions, and sends it back to a Russian e-mail address.
#!
Read the following....extremely scary....
Listens on port 3127; accepts a maximum of 3 connections
at a time. If the first byte of the recieved data is
0x85, the DLL skips the next byte, then compares the next
dword read to 133C9EA2h; if this is true, it accepts
the executable from the sender, downloads it to a temp
file/directory and runs it.
Got Code?
1) Earth landed a multi-ship advance scouting party on Mars this month
2) An earth leader with a track record for aggression speculated in a speech about the resources that might be plundered from Mars
3) Earth announced that it was preparing a full scale manned invasion of Mars by 2050
4) SCO sent a letter demanding payment to Martian citizen Marvin, just in case he uses Linux in his Space Modulator
Sigs are bad for your health.
This is very interesting, because my site has been under a broadly based but inexplicably benign apparent DDoS attack which is bombarding my site with precisely such requests (obviously www.fourmilab.ch, not www.sco.com) at a rate of just one hit from each IP every four minutes. (This rate is not absolutely consistent, and some seem to be running multiple copies of the requester, each hitting every four minutes.)
I've been watching this and running analyses since it became obvious something was up and have posted an incident report page on my site which I'm updating as things develop. Bottom line, the apparent attack appears to have reached equilibrium with a total of 2894 different IP addresses hitting my site since the outbreak, with the hit rate following a diurnal pattern (there's a chart in the incident report) which peaks at around 20,000 hits per hour from on the order of 1000 different hosts at 20:00-21:00 UTC every day.
I'd previously concluded this probably had nothing to do with MyDoom. Although a few of the hosts hitting me are listening on the MyDoom remote control post, most aren't. (Of course, a test version may use a different port or none at all--I discuss in the document.) But the fact that the hits are precisely the same--a simple request to the home page--makes me wonder. All of these sites hitting me request only the "/" page (which at my site is just a <frameset> container, which any browser would follow up with hits on the content frames).
Has anybody else seen this kind of traffic hitting their sites?
In my opinion, I don't think it was a Linux fan that caused it.
Firstly, he attack was not technologically sophisticated, in that it required exploiting a weakness in the operating system. The style of the attack was conceptually sophisticated, it was a worm not a virus. Which means that the attack relied on 'social engineering' or 'human weakness' to succeed.
The exploit however was quite creative. It was multi-faceted, even doing a DDOS on 'www.sco.com'.
Personally, I suspect that the creator and the executor of this worm may be two different persons altogether. Most importantly, the one ultimately responsible for the worm's spread and impact on the internet is not a Linux fan.
Linux users, ones that are capable enough to create such a worm, would more likely be above average intelligence. They would know very well, the consequences of DDOS'sing SCO's web-site, and that these consequences will most definitely be extremely detrimental to Linux. They would also know very well that a DDOS of SCO's web-site is almost a trivial thing to fix, and doesn't help in reducing SCO's position in any way.
Other than making SCO spend some money to rectify the DDOS, and preventing some of SCO's limited customer base from accessing SCO's web-site, it doesn't do relatively much harm to SCO (as compared to finding a back-door or hole into SCO's internal network). There is no real motivation for a Linux fan to carry out a DDOS on SCO's web-site.
I think the REAL reason for this worm, was for a 'frame-up'. It coincides with the conceptually sophisticated thinking as evidenced in its style of attack. I think the real reason was to *help* SCO and Microsoft, because both of these entities have the most to gain from it. Even with the recent 'b' variant of the worm targetting Microsoft. I still think the original motive remains the same.
Either that, or we're dealing with an extremely shallow and stupid 'Linux fan', which I very highly doubt.
People reading this may start having this thought of 'oh, another conspiracy theory...', but I would ask readers to carefully think about the obvious and carefully consider the occurence of this worm. Industrial espionage has been around for a long-time, and we know that it happens. What's to prevent it worms or viruses being used in industrial espoinage? Especially when the internet is a lot more relevant to businesses today.
According to Symantec, this version now modifies your HOSTS file to try and disable the user from being able to reach antivirus websites.
Among other entries in the HOSTS file are Doubleclick, FastClick, and some other advertising-related companies. Should I be concerned or happy that the virus may make surfing the web a little bit better by doing this?
The linked mailing-list at,Math.org reports the preliminary disassembly show that the worm only resolves the name SCO.com, and is unhappy if the name doesn't resolve. My guess is that have the name resolve shows the worm that an active internet connection exists, with out tipping it's hand too badly. In test environments the worm didn't attact SCO.com no matter what the computer's date was set to.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I can't believe this worm has been remotely successful. It's hard to believe that so many people are so incredibly stupid.
It's a bloody -attached- zip file, with a file inside it! People have been told for over a decade to NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS. You'd think they'd catch on sooner than later.
This is all the more reason to strip all binaries from email at the server. Granted, then viruses would be linking to sites - but that'd be relatively easy to shut down, and wouldn't pose any significant threat.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Why is the plural of virus viruses? One octopus and many octopi. One cactus, many cacti. Why not one virus, many virii?
Then why spell it with two 'i's? "Viri" would be correct by your example.
However, in the original latin, "virus" is a collective rather than singular noun (eg "snow" vs "snowflake", although the original meaning is more like "slime".) Perhaps whoever first applied the word to the infectious microscopic critters should have used "virum" as the singular (like "bacterium") in which case the plural would be "vira", but s/he didn't, so we're stuck with "virus" as the singular and an argument over "viri[i]"/"viruses" as the plural.
Personally I think it should be "viruses". You wouldn't say "many doofii", would you? It's "one doofus, many doofuses".
-- Alastair
How many e-mail server admins here are running up to date anti-virus software so that they aren't contributing exponentially to this problem by allowing their clients to get these infected e-mails in the first place?
*raises hand*
Oh yes, and Hotmail over there.
These viruses can't infect Linux (yet) but that's no excuse not to run anti-virus software that kills off virus infected e-mails on your Linux servers so that they're not getting to "clueless Windows users" in the first place.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Most of the spam I get these days comes from SMTP-trojaned Windows boxes sitting on consumer broadband networks.
As I receive spam from these machines, I forward it to the appropriate abuse@ and add the enclosing netblock to my SMTP blacklist. I am slowly but surely shitcanning the customer IP ranges of every consumer broadband network in North America. Considering how uppity the broadband ISPs get when people "abuse" their allegedly-unlimited bandwidth, I'm astounded that they allow unpatched, zombied Windows boxes to just pump out thousands of spam messages.
Probably 98% of people with broadband have zero need or desire to access an SMTP server other than what is provided by their ISP. To that end, I wholeheartedly agree with you that port 25 on these networks should be restricted. The 2% who require less-restricted SMTP capability could be accomodated for a few bucks more per month, and the ISPs could probably add a "one strike and you're out" policy-- account termination upon the first proven complaint about spam originating from the machine of one of those less-restricted SMTP users.
~Philly
I immediately clicked on the feedback link on the BBC website and let the editors know how lopsided and unreasonable their reporting actually was, pointing them to the groklaw.net website as well.
I have considerable experience in attempting to correct misrepresented facts in the media and know that it is often quite hopeless, but if enough people do it and give some proper backing to their arguments perhaps some of the damage can still be repaired.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?