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"Witty" Worm Wrecks Computers
An anonymous reader writes "A new Internet worm wriggled across the entire Internet in the span of a few hours Saturday morning to all computers running several recent versions of firewall software from Internet Security Systems, including BlackICE and RealSecure, according to this story at Washingtonpost.com. The flaw that Witty exploited was discovered Wednesday by eEye Digital Security. The worm overwrites data on the first few sectors of the victim's hard drive, making the machine virtually ubootable and potentially destroying much - if not all - of the victim's data." Update: 03/21 02:18 GMT by T : Reader Jeff Horning points out that eEye actually disovered the worm on the 8th of March, and came up with a fix the next day.
From LURHQ
"This worm has been found to be highly malicious, slowly destroying the systems it infects. Because of this activity, at some point this worm will cease to exist - unfortunately it will take all the affected systems with it. Rather than simply executing a "format C:" or similar destructive command, the worm slowly corrupts the filesystem while it continues to spread."
Like many biological viruses it slowly erodes the health of its host, permitting the host to go on infecting new hosts for some time. How long exactly appears to be unpredictable.
It doesn't kill its host outright immediately and it doesn't allow its host to continue indefinitely. Its like a true disease, a terminal illness for computers (pun not intended).
I think this will be with us for a while, particularly when mutations start showing up.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Several months ago, Microsoft CHKDSK effectively destroyed one of my NTFS partitions -- it managed to screw up $MFT (which points to the location of the Master File Table) and the copy of $MFT within $MFTMirr (which is supposed to be used if $MFT is broken). Anyway, long story short, I spent a couple weeks staring at hex dumps and printouts of the Linux-NTFS project's NTFS documentation. After consuming inordinate amounts of caffeine, I came up with SalvageNTFS, an open-source NTFS data recovery tool that got back all the data I wanted. Assuming the physical media is intact (as in, all read requests to the disk are successful), SalvageNTFS can retrieve data if there is even a single record of the MFT intact.
If the first few sectors of the disk are overwritten, you'll lose the MBR, the partition table, and maybe the boot sector of your first partition. However, the filesystem of that partition is likely to be largely or completely intact. Think: in a few weeks with no prior knowledge of NTFS internals, I created a tool that can continue to operate in this environment. I'd hardly call that a "total mess".
This is indeed a particularly nasty worm. Several other divisions of my company are battling infections. The master boot record on an infected host is almost certainly destroyed by this little dandy and any host which might have been rebooted before an infection is detected is inoperable. Thankfully it is only the relatively recent versions of the software packages that are effected. The divine combination of wisdom and laziness has found this systems administrator blessedly behind the times. The decision to stop upgrading out ISS tools in favor of a push towards OSS now seems all the more prescient. For those in the community who expect big businesses to flop over to OSS immediately, don't hold your breath. Nothing happens over night because big business is slow, no matter how fast the company's advert department declares them to be. We've been actively switching systems over to Linux and OSS for two years now, but the average depreciation cycle means that it takes a minimum of 5 years to switch over an environment, and that only if you put a stake in the ground. Realistically it takes 7 to 10 years to switch over and IT environment in a company which judges IT investment solely on Cost Benefit Analysis.
If it's a FAT16 or FAT32 partition, the primary FAT table will be wiped. While there is a second copy at the end of the partition, finding and restoring it will not be trivial.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Code running with Administrator privileges is assumed to be trustworthy and know what it is doing. The problem is that there is way too much code running as Administrator.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The average joe isnt going to be monitoring any lists.. they will just ( hopefully ) plug in whatever box that came with their pc.. or at worst, accept defaults on software, which normally is useless..
Thast the reality of 90% of the 'home users'.. so a 'free' hardware firewall is the best solution. Since they give away printers, they shoudld be giving away firewalls too.. they are just as cheap. ( though, yes i realize that they make their money via ink carts.. but you get my point )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Try running Testdisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html
It comes as part of Knoppix I believe, and was a great help last time someone lost their partition table. After that, just fsck as normal.
The worm's functionality is as follows:
1) Generates a random IP address
2) Sends the worm payload
3) Repeats steps 1-2 20,000 times
4) Opens a random PHYSICALDRIVE from 0-7, which allows raw hard disk access
5) Seeks to a random point on the disk
6) Writes 65K of data from the beginning of the vulnerable DLL to the disk
7) Closes the disk
8) Starts the process over from step 1
(emphasis mine)