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Microsoft Mail Worms Gang War?
cuzality writes "The media is now beginning to suggest that this recent onslaught of new viruses (with new versions of major-impact viruses being found daily) the result of a virus gang turf war, kinda like the India/Pakistan virus conflict, in which official Pakistani sites were savaged by such infamous groups as Indian Snakes and Indian Hackers Club. The gangs are shooting fast and loose: variations of the big ones are being discovered daily (as of March 4, we are up to MyDoom.H, Netsky.F, and Beagle.K), and in the space of three hours on Wednesday morning, five variants of these three were first discovered. Typically these viruses (or more correctly, worms) do little damage to the infected computer, intent mostly on spreading far and wide, and sometimes inflicting DoS on some poor evil empire."
Where's the question?
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
It was bound to happen, given that more and more worms are written for criminal spammers. And since spammers AND criminals are stupid, they will fight each others.
I mean, seriously, how hard is it to write malicious code if you can get the person to run any program. Heck, here's my virus:
This is NOT hacking... it's taking advantage of stupid people...
Jay | http://oldos.org
I always wondered what motivated these people. Is it as simple as recognition? Its not like they can tell anybody it was they who did it. Really it isn't even "neat" on a technical scale. So they don't do it for a challege. They don't do for noteriety. They just do it to cause trouble.
Seems like the internet version of the street vandalizer has come to pass. Sad really.
It's all Politics
In the late 1800's in the American west there was a boom in illegal activities (Billy the Kid, Butch and Sundance, etc.). The citizenry had enough and banded together (i.e., paid taxes) to fight back (i.e., hired police). Cyberspace is in the equivalent of the late 1800's in terms of working out who controls what. Now we, the citizenry, must decide if we want to hire the Pinkertons or establish a proper police force. Just remember, the Pinkertons were often as dirty-dealing as the crooks they were after, and the Sheriff was usually a former badguy with a badge.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
The only reason anyone writes a virus these days is to do it. Even when there's an added payload (like a DDOS to www.sco.com), the virus is out there solely to be out there. The fact that it's due to rivaling gangs makes perfect sense.
If someone were to write a truly destructive virus (you open it, it sends itself to everyone in your inbox, then promptly writes random data over your hard drive) then we'd really see people start to take viruses seriously.
Even the most "destructive" viruses in recent history have wimped out in some way -- just consider Michelangelo, which was hard-coded to become destructive at a much later date, long after it would be discovered and patches written.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Yeah, the article poster mentioned that they did "little damage". I don't think destroying .sav files with 95% probability on local and remote drives constitutes little damage.
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson
With that in mind, those programmer comments being reported now, although they do seem to show a gang war, may just be more misdirection and once again the media fell for it. If it really is the spammers behind it all, and criminal elements doing it (yeah, I know, "spammers" and "criminal elements" are redundant), this gang war idea may just be more cover.
Meanwhile there are millions of zombie Windows boxes around the world with clueless owners not realizing they are 0wn3d. That's the real story the media should be following up on.
Of Neal Stephenson's thing about how in the future when you go outside you'll have to breathe through a hankerchief, a la 19th-century london, because the air will be filled with millions of malicious nanobots, and millions of helpful nanobots neatly neutralizing the malicious ones, and millions of meta-malicious nanobots that only exist to disable the neutralizers... just one big no-net-effect hacker arms race.
I wonder how long it will be and how much futher adoption of windows server operating systems we'll have to see before internet traffic starts to look like that.
If being the victim of a Microsoft worm is like being caught in the crossfire of a gang war, there's a simple solution: stay out of the line of fire. If you had a choice between one house in a safe neighborhood, and another house of roughly the same price in a neighborhood where bullets from the local crack dealers were coming through your walls at three in the morning, where would you choose to live?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Are these really viruses? Only two are actually mass-mailing worms that don't rely on Outlook's address book to send themselves. All of them rely on the user to open and run the malware program. Some of the MyDoom variants I'm seeing don't even make a feeble attempt at social engeering. Apparently most users are just downloading and executing attachments without even thinking. This despite all the warnings and hype surrounding e-mail containing "viruses".
Imagine if e-mail was just plain old ASCII text with no attachment support. *sigh*
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Well, what are you sposed to do, when you've got thousands of users doing menial stuff all day long, and the people who have to deal with this crap arent the people who can implement change? I fix virus infected machines at the state all day, but that doesnt mean i can just call someone up and ask them to block .bat files at the server, or kill msn messenger ports. They just don't care, because they have 'bigger' concerns.
Except that the subject isn't a grammatically correct question. Hell, it's not even a grammatically correct statement.
Dinivin
Why don't these "hackers" use their skills to do something productive. With the time and effort they're putting into this programming, they probably could have written some utility software that would have earned them bags of money. But where's the fun in that.
TechTV's The Screen Savers last night suggested that one of the motivations of competitive virus writers is because the anti-virus companies put out rank-order lists such as the one shown on SARC's homepage. Maybe those lists should be discontinued to at least knock down some of the motivation?
The coverage by the media on these viruses is just outright terrible. There's always the assumption that all users are affected, when in reality a number of users are completely unaffacted by these viruses (reduced internet bandwidth aside). The growing number of Linux, MacOS X, BSD, and various other unix-based flavors are largely unaffected by these attacks. Furthermore, those Windows users who keep up with patches & fixes and use firewalls are also largely unaffacted.
This piece by MSNBC is a prime example that never once clarifies that some people may not even be affected by these viruses.
For the "cyber" reporters out there: get a clue and portray more than one perspective.
Did Microsoft create them? No.
Do they exploit any vulnerability that Microsoft is responsible for creating? No. (They spread by tricking users into running the attached executables.)
I know it's fun to pretend that everything bad is Microsoft's fault (and I'm no fan of Microsoft myself), but come on... how does it make any sense to prefix something with "Microsoft" when Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with it? What's next? "Microsoft OpenSSL vulnerability discovered"? "Microsoft recording industry sues 12-year-old kid"? "Microsoft PATRIOT act renewed"? "Hacker charged with violating the Microsoft DMCA"?
Class action lawsuits. Hear me out.
.zip files), and if you find one, you quarantine your likely-infected customer so that the only webpage they can see is one served from your network explaining that they are infected. Until they take steps to clean their machines, you quarantine all outgoing traffic on their connection.
This virus mess could be solved very rapidly: Anyone that provides internet service needs to monitor outgoing port 25 connections, and do attachment scanning. You don't even need to scan the attachments for viruses. Just look for all Windows executable file extensions (including inside
This is drastic, but unavoidable. The people that are causing these viruses to spread are (by and large) too ignorant to ever keep their machines disinfected by themselves, unless forced to. The only people that can force them to do this are the ones providing them with internet service.
Now back to the lawsuits. The ONLY way you are ever going to get the ISP's to spend money to implement this filtering/quarantine is if you sue them for allowing their infected customers to cause harm to your business. A class action lawsuit against ISP's on behalf of people doing business on the internet.
Care to join me?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
If evil didn't exist, humans would have to invent it. Face it, computers are boring, but "Rival Hacker Gangs Virus Turf War" is the lifeblood of pop media newstertainment.
Here are some more down to earth email worms.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I've gotten this one to two of my domains. It's actually comparatively persuasive. I went so far as to open the zip file, though I certainly didn't run the .exe. Mine accuses me of sending spam from my mail server, which I suppose isn't entirely impossible, since I've been accused of sending spam before once or twice. (I send out announcements to a small set of people, and on occasion people who have fallen out of the group get irate when I haven't removed their names.)
It came directly to my mail server; it hadn't been relayed. That makes sense: anybody may contact my mail server to send mail, as long as it's to me.
But this makes a lousy worm, since most people don't own their own domains. This will 0wn only a fairly limited set of computers, compared to the bazillions of zombies you can get by fooling people who use a major ISP but don't own their own domains.
This one doesn't even really require worm-ness. It goes out only to registered mail servers, which is small enough to connect to individually by one or two dedicated computers with broadband connections.
I wasn't in the mood to trace down who was responsible for it,but I hope somebody does.
It will be the fastest spreading worm in history...
The human race never ceases to amaze and disapoint me.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
The first part of the question is understood, at least by those who understand such things: "[Is this a] Microsoft mailworms gang war?"
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
wow, so you've just made it so noone can ever send any kind of executable attachment ever again, legitimate or not. yea, that'll make EVERYONE real happy.
Personally, I send myself zip files with executables in them all the time, on purpose, for work-related stuff. Why should I not be able to do that?
That's a great idea, but where is this server space going to come from for little jimmie or his parents sending grandma a picture? On his computer? But if he has cable modem service, chances are it is against the Terms of Use to set up a server on his computer. Maybe that cable service has some small amount of web hosting space that comes along with it, in which case OK. But who is going to train all the computer illiterates how to use FTP or something similar? Then what happens in the future is to make it all simpler, someone goes ahead and just embeds this file attachment transfer system into an email client, making it seamless and feel just like before when we had email attachments. Aren't we basically back to square one? Who is going to stop the people from mindlessly saving and running the file this time?
Users click "OK/Yes" on messages just like they click "I Agree" on license agreements. Either that, or the from address is spoofed and they think it's safe to open it.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
It's time to just block all E-mail attachments. If you want to send a file, do it some other way, like uploading it to a server for explicit download.
Then the virus will just send out an email saying "download this for free porn" and link to it. It's been done already.
As for limiting file types, good luck. Your plan would not allow web pages, for instance, and you'd kill every online game in existence.
Aren't many people having trouble finding IT jobs? There was the dot-com crash and then outsourcing...
The difference is that the grenade trick would only work once.
DNA just wants to be free...
they are not your mother, your nanny, your babysitter, or nipple giver; they provide a pipeline. YOU whitelist YOUR in-mail and *make* customers contact you via you website or the phone.
Turning isp's into "watchers" is a bad, very, very bad idea.
This is only a Microsoft worm/virus/trojan in the sense that it runs a Windows exe. This is NOT a failing with Outlook or Outlook Express. This code can be run from ANY client that allows attachments
[paraphrased email text below]
"Hi, I'm the admin from [YourEmailServer]. We've been getting complaints about your account, and we think you have a virus. Please open the attachment, and run the file. Password is 12345
Cheers, [YourEmailServer]
Haven't we been asking the ISP's to get on top of the virus problem? Well...here comes an email, supposedly doing just that!
"We think you have a problem, and here's how to fix it"
This exact same thing could have been targeted to the OSX environment, or a *nix script.
"Hi, due to the traffic we've noticed, we think your Mac/Linux box has been compromised. Please run this script to identify and fix the problem."
Now...most *nix users are a bit more clueful and suspicious. But, more than a few would be caught out.
(and if you, the writer(s) of these things are out there reading this...this is NOT a compliment. You are not cute, nor are you inventive. You are merely a fool. And one that will be caught. Hopefully for you, by the authorities. They will be much easier on you than we will be...we won't be using vaseline)
Allow PDF, GIF, and JPEG at the firewall and in the mail client. That's it.
From the PDF 1.5 Reference Manual
8.5 Actions
Instead of simply jumping to a destination in the document, an annotation or outline item can specify an action (PDF 1.1) for the viewer application to perform, such as launching an application, playing a sound, or changing an annotation's appearance state... In addition, the optional OpenAction entry in a document's catalog (Section 3.6.1, "Document Catalog") may specify an action to be performed when the document is opened.
Looks like PDF has the potential to cause some damage too.
It might have been more effective had the authors observed standard grammatical principles. After all, they are pretending to represent a institution of higher learning.
Seriously guys, who moderated this up? The latest round of worms take advantage of exactly 0 security exploits in Windows or assorted applications; they're all social engineering. Even if Microsoft is loaded with cash, you can't seriously expect them to pay out for what is fundamentally a problem with the users. Your second idea(go after the users) makes sense, but you can't sue someone just because their users are morons, it makes no sense.
"Of course it doesn't help that people we've helped in the past by emailing them fixes, solutions, and patches..."
There's nothing like convincing people to open random excutable attachments to keep your job safe.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Considering the number of people I've encountered who don't even know what a "program" is (all they know are that there are a set of different boxes on their screen, each of which does something different), how can you expect them to understand what executable code is, or how it gets run, or why it shouldn't be run?
You've seen polarized power plugs, right? The ones with one blade slightly wider than the other. This is to prevent people with no knowledge of electricity from inserting the plug into the receptacle in a way that will blow up their equipment.
Microsoft software is like having unpolarized plugs. To someone who knows what they are doing, this is not a problem, but for the average user, the useless ability to plug it in backwards has no beneficial properties whatsoever.
There should be no way to run an executable from a mail client. Not even a dialog that asks "Are you sure you want to run this?" People avoid thinking by simply clicking "Yes" to any question they are asked. It needs to be forbidden to execute an attachment. If you really, really must, then you can save it to a folder somewhere, then run it from there.
Microsoft's practices of allowing users to perform any bone-headed, ill-advised actions they wish, should rank right up there with the irresponsibility of not supplying polarized plugs for electrical equipment. In fact, this situation is even more serious, since an incorrectly inserted power plug only has the potential to destroy the machine and/or the user, whereas a virus infection in a corporate network can potentially impact thousands of people.
No. He meant redundant. A redundant question is one that doesn't need to be asked, a rhetorical question is one that doesn't need to be answered. Big difference.
That would be even funnier if the links worked in the second page...
The most powerful way to bypass security has always been "social engineering" - so why would you think it'll be different for virii?
If people actually do wisen up and stop opening email attachments they're unsure about, the virus writers will just come up with more creative ways to convince you to run the code. Write a small applet that lets them play a contest game to win money - only, nobody is really going to win anything, and it drops a trojan horse on the PC. Send mail that looks like a legitimate attached form from the ISP, requesting some sort of info your ISP might actually need. (Heck, one popular method seems to currently be bundling "malware" with legitimate freeware apps people want to download and use - like p2p music sharing packages, pop-up blockers, and time synchronizing clients.) Who knows? This problem isn't going to go away just by trying to "educate it away", telling people not to read the stuff they get in their email.
Personally, I think virus scanners are generally a bit "behind the times" in this war. EG. How many scanners have you seen that allow starting up without having to boot the actual OS that's being used, so they can remove a virus without it getting a chance to execute in RAM first? Of these, how many can scan an NTFS file system when started up in that manner? (To my knowledge, only the expensive "Avast BART" product currently offers all of this.) Modern trojan horses and virii are often shutting down the virus scanner processes so scanners can't remove them. They even do such things as prevent "regedit" from running, so you can't just prune them from the registry and reboot. (Of course, so far, many are coded poorly enough so you can just rename regedit to something else and then run it -- but that's bound to change.)
One of the problems with the destruction of files is that it implies this virus author isn't interested in commercial games (as such people want their virus well hidden). Thats worry because they are then not trying to hide within a system (like a well evolved natural virus) but can be quite happy to kill the host.. and all it takes is a bios erase or randomly setting the IDE disk password on all modern IDE hard disks and its factory return time.