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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.
Although they ain't perfect, at least they're not running on your computer. Yikes.
glad to see virus's doing some real damage now, im tired of these stupid virus that just send out emails.. how weak, if we had more virus's that would wipe out entire systems then there would be some more pressure on software companys to fix things
It's a shame when the very piece of software you set up to protect your system turns out to be your system's destruction :(
I mean seriously who ever thought it was a good idea to run a firewall on the actual computer connected to the net ? I mean you can buy an applicance router/firewall that is GOOD for what 29 Bucks , thats what I just paid for my netgear wireless router. I have never understood why you would want to run the firewall on the actual connected system. Guess they cant say its better than running nothing anymore.
Now, every windows user aware of this will believe a firewall is a great danger for his computer.
Oh... After all, what will it change ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We can blame SCO for making people afraid to use Linux, causing them to stay on Windows using crappy firewalls.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
How can you recover someone's data from an unbootable HD?
Bolt it into a G4 Mac tower and pull files to your heart's delight.
You can. I can. 99.9% of Windows users can't.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'd advise anyone who depends on any kind of software firewall to go out and buy some sort of hardware firewall.
I reccomend Linksys
Those who depend on Windows Firewalling should beware also.. in fact I'm surprised it wasnt that firewall that was exploited in the first place.
You could say this was Microsoft's fault for making a crappy, userless don't-manage-memory-well kernel, for having inadequate file systems that lack permision bits, and the list goes on and on. Why else did the poor suckers have to BUY a third party firewall? Because Microsoft is a toy OS that has no place on the internet, that's why. There are many other good reasons this is Microsoft's fault, I'll leave them to others. That would be funny if it were not true.
Yeah. Knoppix to the rescue! (Again)
If it overwrites the first few sectrs of the harddrive, as opposed to the first few sectors of the partiton, then it will take out the MBR which contains the partition table. You can have a physical disk broken up into several partitions eg a 60Gb disk that is partitoned as a 10GB C: drive and a 50GB d: drive.
Who knows who windows will interpreit a partition table containg random data, it might boot far enough to write to the drive using a mistaken idea of how big the partitions are reducing the chance of data recovery.
We are just guessing based on these first reports. Someone will analyse the worm properly in a day or two and give a better idea of how to deal with it.
'fdisk /mbr' should restore it.
MS Support article
What?
This is why having a firewall running on the machine(s) it's supposed to protect is idiotic.
When will the Windows world (and, to a lesser extent, the *nix world) wake up and realize that putting all services on a single box is just asking for trouble?
A firewall should be a dedicated, hardened host that is easily rebuilt if compromised. A firewall should not be the only layer of security.
.@.
boooooring. then you don't have an open SMTP/HTTP/TCP proxy open for the taking, or a 1,000 user botnet on IRC. if you destroy the computer, then the owner immediately notices and your program will not spread as far. most worms are non-obvious so they go undetected for longer.
When (not if) somebody REALLY wants to destabilize things in the United States, or anywhere in the world for that matter, they will unleash one or several worms that affect systems similarly to this one. I have heard theories from a few people that the root cause of last summer's blackout was the result of something like this. It is easy to dismiss these claims as the wack job rants of conspiracy theorists, but it certainly IS possible, and if this was the real cause there were a lot of people who had a vested interest in keeping it quiet. Remember there is usually some element of truth in what the "nuts" have to say.
A group with enough talent and financial support (even small-to-mid level drug dealer types can generate millions of dollars every month) would have no trouble performing audits on and locating holes in all kinds of systems, and could write worms that could shut down a very large portion of the computers on the internet, including many military and governmnent installations. Google for "warhol worm" too get an idea of how quickly this could be done.
Our main concern shouldn't be the spammers who write viruses, it should be the first REAL cyberterrorist out there that decides to actually do something.
For the record, I know I am not any safer (well, not much safer anyway) because I run ipfilter for my firewall and apache for my web server, and update my virus patterns every day. IPV6 might help a little, at least in a 128 bit address space, my system won't be found by anybody's random scans.
Well i'm glad this was posted on slashdot even though I had submitted this *hours* before.
I've also updated my blog with all the relevent links and data . The speed of the worm creation is frightening, less then 5 days from the vulnerability announcement to the time that the worm hit the internet. No one can claim this is a spamming effort either since, as noted in other posts here, it is destroying the disks on the machine as well. It's actually like a game of russion roulette, it targets one of the first 8 disks and if the disk doesn't exist it simply continues it's routine of attacking 20,000 random addresses. This is the first worm I can remember that is actually malicious.
Listed on the above blog are the following links:
eEye advisory
ISS advisory
lurhq analysis
SANS diary report
F-Secure writeup
Symantec writeup
Witty Worm Capture 1 and 2 (from dslreports.com)
and the text from SANS capture of the worm.
I've been capturing UDP traffic all day and hope to compile some more interesting information later on.
To be fair if the system softs allow a firewall app to write to the boot block of the disk, I would blame the system softs.
Where would we be if Wheel had hid her round rock in a cave instead of showing everyone how it rolls?
This is a huge hole. It requires no end-user action whatsoever to exploit. The "security" program it attacks is probably running with administrator privileges, even on locked down systems. There's no reason a packet filter should be able to write raw disks. In fact, if it still runs with those privileges, you want to get this "security" product off your system now. This might not be the only hole.
I'd like to apologise for the poster your responding to and I'd like to point that the 99.9% of OTHER Linux users are not starry eyed PFB's trying to cram their particular religion down everyone's throats.
We know Linux needs work before its ready for prime time, just like we know that there are certain trade-offs between convenance and security.
I do believe that Windows users have gotten a bit of a drop here by Microsoft, but that would be more of a monopoly issue and bad planning (if we had the lead all this time WE would certainly have made some mistakes too).
So keep using your Windows PC in peace. Its got a lot of useful functionality and as a Gnome developer once suggested, the most secure operating system is the one your comfortable with and can keep updated. As Linux gains marketshare you can bet some vunerabilities will be found, some we'll expect and some we wont. Maybe you'll find it more appealing after its had more time to mature. Don't let zealots color your opinions too much, they speak for themselves.
Quack, quack.
Actually, we don't really give a crap about what you want. You're mostly cluebies who shouldn't have a say in the matter, and the cause of most of these problems. You're the ones who use the vulnerable software, and click on things because they tell you to. (Remember, one of the last worms was purely a trojan---the user had to do all the work.)
You should use Linux (or OSX, or whatever), because we tell you to, and we know what we're talking about. You're causing problems that affect a lot of people (the networks get saturated), and you need to stop.
Let's look at your points:
Anyway, your last (unnumbered) point about programs needing refinement is probably the only accurate one. Most do need refinement; however, the beautiful thing about the Linux and Free Software community is that they constantly are being refined. And if there's something you don't like, I suggest you help out, or quit complaining about it.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Now where have I seen this before? Let me think. What are the distinctive points about Witty's design?
Now where have I seen this before? Oh yes - SQL Slammer/Sapphire.
Witty roots a firewall, it spreads rapidly, it's extremely small and minimalistic (sort of bootsector size) yet still carries a destructive payload... this is not your average 16-year-old, this is one of the old school. Probably in his 30s, it's very probably the same author who wrote Sapphire, and he's probably a pro by now (white-hat? av company? competing firewall?).
Actually, we don't really give a crap about what you want. You're mostly cluebies who shouldn't have a say in the matter, and the cause of most of these problems. You're the ones who use the vulnerable software, and click on things because they tell you to. (Remember, one of the last worms was purely a trojan---the user had to do all the work.)
You should use Linux (or OSX, or whatever), because we tell you to, and we know what we're talking about. You're causing problems that affect a lot of people (the networks get saturated), and you need to stop.
Oh god shut up, shut up, shut the FUCK UP.
*cough*
Excuse me, but you can shove that condescending know-it-all attitude straight up your ass.
I use Windows because the overall experience, at least for Desktop use, has been better. Stuff actually works the way I expect it to. I plug in a firewire hard disk, it installs and loads drivers, and the partitions, if any, appear. Instantly. No going to linux1394.org, downloading a shell script, and hoping it works. I click a torrent in mozilla, or Explorer, or whatever, and it loads my Bittorrent client automatically. More recent distros are better, but you won't win anyone over with that attitude.
Last time I had reliability problems with windows, the hard disk was failing. But since I fixed that problem (which not even Linux is immune to) I've had ZERO problems booting. And to be honest, I haven't had any security problems.
Whoa, you think I'm lying, right?
No, I'm not. In the time I've been running 2K and XP, not once have I had:
A Trojan
A Worm
Spyware
Malware
of any sort have any sort of presence on my machine.
Granted, I run Mozilla, Apache (with a secured user-account of its own,) instead of the usual windows implements. Sometimes the opensource community does create stuff that truly JUST WORKS. At least they're smart enough to not get arrogant about it.
But for kicks I run without a firewall and as an administrator 100% of the time. Still waiting for all the problems you describe.
So, kindly, pull that stick out of your ass. Thank you.
Isn't it amazing that that according to MS it is absolutely essential to add a browser and a mutimedia player to their OS, and these items cannot be removed without damaging the OS. However, truly essential OS addons like a firewall and virus detection somehow never find there way into the OS.
Linux needs to take a lesson here -- before it is too late. The major opensource distros need to get together and back an open source virus detection program and all distros should provide disk space for the distribution of updates. The opensource firewall is already there but it needs to be "dumbed down" and gui'ed.
Such would be true of most firewall software, because it likely runs with privilege (oftimes in kernel, yeek!).
Nearly any vulnerability in ipfw or the Linux ipchains implementation that resulted in execution of arbitrary code would allow the attacker to write to the boot block of the disk, among other nasty things.
Because "fdisk /mbr" isn't something Haji and his Dell support pals can do. But they can "return the system to factory defaults" which undoes all other updates... Hey look, blaster's back!
Shift happens. Fire it up.