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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.
How can we blame M$ for this?
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 :(
Worms and Viruses caused DATA LOSS!
It's nice to see a worm that actually damages your disk once again. Perhaps people will begin to see them as more than a nuiscance.
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.
Do you really expect us to believe more than ten people worldwide run Windows on their firewalls? ;-)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
I was just thinking about this, can the company be held liable for their software allowing others to basically destroy all data on the computer?
:)
Then I got to thinking, what about Microsoft whose os's and products who have cost millions and millions of dollars.... while some of them require user interaction, others have effectively shutdown the internet for wide areas for short periods of the time.. remember the sql one?
Most infected computers will have to be rebuilt from scratch unless their owners instead decide to buy new ones
I didn't know worms were so powerful now that they could melt a computer into a pile of toxic sludge. : /
-Colin
"FGTRGDI" (Feels good to run gnu/linux doesent it?)
More cryptic acronyms to the people!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Now that you've got yourself a computer system at home, you'll want to protect it from the evils of the Internet. Because Operating Systems are chock full of holes just waiting to be exploited, you should, at a minimum, take the following steps... Step 1. Go out and buy a firewall product for your machine. Also pick up some virus protection software. Step 2. Ok, now install the firewall software... Oh......Damn It!
First, the speed at which the exploit was translated from advisory to a malicious worm.. Second, this is one of the few old-school "do as much damage as you can" worms. At least it makes a change from the monotony of the mass mailing attachment exploit variety of viruses..Not a welcome change for the people who got hit by it of course :(
By the way, in case you get prompted for registration and your principles don't allow you to give out your email address, use Bugme Not to find a login. Click here
How would overwriting the first few sectors result in loss of all data? Wouldn't that just overwrite the boot sector only? Can't you still retrieve your data?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
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 ?
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.
It's a weekend, why should they care about putting out their timely alerts, eh?
"Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of the government's cybersecurity efforts, were unavailable for comment."
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".
Newspapers, magazines, letters, and stamps.
How 1980s. Yikes.
My father is a blogger.
Hey, serves these folks right! I mean who'd be stupid enough to have a Windows machine on the internet without any kind of firewa...
err, never mind.
Installed a snort rule this morning using:
7 76974747920 6d6573736167652068657265|";re\v:1;)
2 0.
alert udp any 4000:5000 -> any any (msg:"Witty Initial Traffic";
content:"|29202020202020696e7365727420
Found via http://isc.incidents.org/diary.html?date=2004-03-
After running it for about 10 minutes and seeing 1,000's of matches, I decided it was better to delete the rule since it was logging to a MySQL database for fear of overloading the disk, and go back to bed.
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.
Yeah. Knoppix to the rescue! (Again)
I bet this worm was written by a disgruntled network administrator sick of those "I'm being attacked" emails.
> More cryptic acronyms to the people!
That's MCATTP around here, chum.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
but this is inherently why the idea of a firewall LOCAL to the system it is protecting is a ... shall I say "retarded" idea.
A firewall is best a physical device between your network and the "great big intarweb". That way if your firewall IS comprimised, you arent immediatly toast.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I told him I would never buy any of their products since I figured they were just as likely to insert their own backdoors in the products due to maturity reasons.
This is just priceless though, I wish that guy a hardy Nelson "har har".
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
Surelly you could still access the data and copy it onto another Hard disk, burn it to CD or copy it to a USB pen by running Knoppix.
Virus for Linux are not likely to be very damageable. For doing such kind of things (ie. the first blocks of a hard disk), the virus should be based on a remote root exploit, which happens, but is *very* rare. Most exploits are local, so you can't use them if you don't have a ssh account on this computer.
It's easier in a windows environment to make big remote damages because many programs and servers run at administrator rights ; which is the case of this firewall software. In linux, all the firewalling stuff is based on netfilter/iptables, netfilter in kernel space, and iptables as the super-user interface. The benefit of having firewalling facilities in kernel space, integrated with the TCP/IP stuff, are that the size of the potentially unsecure code is quite small, when in windows all the security stuff is a user space developers responsability.
I know this may look like a troll. But windows security design is a disaster ; and I don't think this will really change soon.
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 ----
Worms? *rubs ass on carpet*
Ahhhh~
Actually, pretty easy.
:-)
If you could actually turn off unwanted and insecure services you wouldn't NEED a firewall.
My FreeBSD/Linux based routers serve as firewalls for my Windows boxes. Very easy to turn off everything but ssh.
In Windows you can't even tell whats running let alone shut it off. There are many ports that get attached to every interface and no way to fix it.
The first and only firewall most people need is an OS that doesn't open itself up to the world like a cheap two-bit, umm, door. Or something.
From looking at the disassembly it looks more like it sends 20000 copies of itself to random destinations, then tries to open one of HD0-7, if the open fails it goes back to sending, if it succeeds it overwrites a random 64kB-aligned 64kB chunk of the first 2 GiB with some data, reseeds the prng and goes back to sending, if the open fails it simply loops back to sending another 20k copies.
I'd hardly call 2GiB a few sectors...
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.
It doesn't just write the the MBR. It pushes 64k of data to RANDOM locations on a randomly selected hard-disk. At some point it bombs the MBR, but it bombs other portions of the disks on a machine.
NASTY worm. Definitely old-school in nature- I wondered when someone would get around to making something along these lines.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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)
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.
Blue screens and memory dumps are normal Windows behavior. Nothing to be worried about.
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.
"Witty" Worm Wrecks Workstations!
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.
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.
You can't tell whats running? This is very easy, actually. Try this:
To see what ports are currently listening:
netstat -an
To see what services are attached to what process: /svc
tasklist
To stop a process (until next boot):
sc stop _service_name_
To query a state of a process:
sc query _service_name_
>buy some sort of hardware firewall.
>I reccomend Linksys
I hate to disappoint you, but your linksys box is not a hardware firewall.
It is a dedicated microcomputer that runs a SOFTWARE firewall.
The potential for an exploit that pierces this firewall or erases all its program memory is not less than with the product currently under attack.
All firewalls can have bugs. This is determined by the quality of the software, and the fact that it runs in a small plastic box is not automatically going to improve that.
Calling it "hardware" isn't going to do that either.
[accidently posted this in the hardware router anonymously] After running BlackICE for less than a week, curious to see for myself what it was capable of, I was unlucky enough to get hit with this and lucky enough to kill it after it ran for an hour and half (blackd.exe opened port 4000 locally at 5:17 gmt, Mar.19.) It doesn't appear to have done any damage though, certainlly not to my MBR (though if it randomly writes to any sector I don't think there was a chance of this,) but I'm certain it sent more than the 20,000 needed to trigger the junk data being written in the 90 minutes it ran. With no record of the packets it sent, I do have a record of nearly 10,000 angry ICMP responses, the bulk of which are from a single address which first caused me to believe my IP was being spoofed, but I suspect this represents a fraction of the addresses it successfully sent to (locally it attempted to send ~6GB at 10Mb/s.) Up until now I've never felt the need for a hardware router.