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DNS Cache Poisoning Spreads Malware
Gamma_UCF writes "As of April 4, 2005 the SANS Internet Storm Center has raised their alert level to Yellow following a rash of active DNS poisonings. The infected DNS servers are re-directing users from popular sites such as Google or American Express to malware infecting advertising sites. According to the ISC presentation on the attack, it is believed to be linked to known spammers and malware distributors. The full presentation of information up until this point can be found here."
- Change the company's DNS server here to map google.com to a private machine here on the network.
- Create a frontend on the internal machines here that looks exactly like google.com
- Map the internal IP addresses on the network to specific people here.
- Inject specific "spooky" messages into the search results based on the IP address of the querying
machine. Examples would be like: "How about looking at some pr0n, Mr. Bridges?" or "You really
should have that bald patch looked at, sir."
- April Fools! HA HA!
- Look for a new job.
Oh well, you only live once./^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Anyone who has been on irc for over 8 years remembers when DNS cache poisoning first started showing up (about 97.)
/dline ipmask :reason."
This is a quote from the "IRC Operators Guide" written in 8/97:
"DNS spoofing is a relatively new hit these days on IRC. You'll generally find spoofs one of two ways - you're watching the connections (usermode +c) and an unusual hostmask appears, or a user reports one. The first thing to do is to get the user's IP address (/stats L nick), and check to see if the DNS lookup matches the IP address. If it doesn't, you know you have a spoof. With this information, you can KILL the spoof, and when it reconnects, see where the real host is and issue a K-line (which won't stop them from spoofing again, but will prevent them from signing on *without* spoofing). Some servers have the capability of D-lines, which allow you to ban by ip mask. A D-line will prevent the client from connecting at all, regardless of whether they try DNS spoofing or not. If the server supports the DLINE command, you can do
It has been a well known problem since way back then and it has still not be dealt with in any real way.
following a rash of active DNS poisonings
:/
Damn internet rashes, they're the worst. Remember, dont surf without protecting your board.
I give it two years until the sight of a rainbow fills me with abject terror and confusion.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Is this done basically by taking over insecure DNS servers or is something more subtle involved, e.g. making comuters treat your machine as their DNS server instead?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Worse, perhaps, is that all these problems may encourage some horrible proprietary internet standards to arise, claiming safety from ad/spy/malware, phishing, etc. and all the cattle have to do is sign up, abandoning the old internet.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's the malware on the sites that the infected DNS servers redirect to.
--Mike Boos
We have. This has been a known problem since early 1997. It is well documented in the IRC community (admins and coders.)
Documents like this one from 1997: http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~kennyz/doc/unix/dns.spoof
I've been using Opera for 6 years now and I'm a little confused.
What is "malware"?
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Oh, wait...
Idiot.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
You know the British secret service use color coded bikini's for terror alert levels. Black-Special Bikini has got to be the coolest alert level around :)
Isn't this kind of attack on the global Internet exactly the kind of thing that Homeland Security's "Cybersecurity" department is responsible for stopping? What are we paying them billions of dollars, and suspending our liberties, to do? While we're at it, what's the difference between National security, Homeland security, and Defense? Aren't they all just riding a single planebombing to unchecked power and riches, without accountability or results?
--
make install -not war
Has anybody tried to redirect windowsupdate.microsoft.com? That could potentially install malware at massive privilege levels and therefore impossible to remove. And it's done automatically.
Automatic updates that are not signed and verified will not install.
And besides, there are plenty of cross-platform attack you could do with this.
Want a copy of a user's eBay cookie? (Ok maybe eBay doesn't save passwords this way but you get the point, lots of sites do. It's like phishing, but the computer believes it's genuine, not just the user).
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I bet that malware is Internet Explorer-specific.
Yes. It's so great to use a web browser that doesn't rely on Microsoft technology like DNS...
Oh, wait...
Yes, the malware is almost certainly designed to install via IE, not other (better) browsers.
Methinks the idiot here is the one who signed
his post "Idiot"
I believe that all Windows Update patches are digitally signed, so this spoof might be harder to pull of than it would initially seem
Did you run the warez server? I know that guys name.
- "dnscache does not cache (or pass along) records outside the server's bailiwick; those records could be poisoned. Records for foo.dom, for example, are accepted only from the root servers, the dom servers, and the foo.dom servers."
Djbdns"dnscache is immune to cache poisoning."
While I don't think I'm in the clear because of this, I feel better protected from the (unwashed ;)) internet. Anyone care to comment, please do, as I've just started using this and want to know how effective it is.
bo
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
they are. Hopefully someone will take the GP down a notch or 2 from "5-insightful" and up your retort a few notches from "1"
Its not just windowsupdate.microsoft.com that is prived - it's a little more sophisticated than that.
I'm not even a MS apologist...haven't used a MS product in many years (except when I'm forced to for work-related reasons)
If you read down the SANS presentation you come to this:
The following list shows how far-reaching this attack proved to be. The list is a small, categorized excerpt of the 665 domain names from his site (with my short notes) that were being re-directed to hostile web servers. It is very important to note that e-mail, FTP logins, HTTPS sessions, and other types of traffic were also being re-directed to the malicious servers. We do not believe that the attacker was reading e-mail or collecting passwords, but we have no conclusive proof to assert either theory.
Totally browser/machine agnostic attacks, no user intervention. If you look at the names of the sites, many of them are financial institutions! And all of those victims that click okay everytime they get an "invalid certificate" message. Be afraid, very afraid.
I was throwing you the 48, but you made me switch to the 132.
There are probably other ways, but it isn't hard.
The bottom line, DNS is an untrustworthy system.
This is a DNS server issue, not a client issue.
Suppose you visit citibank.com often. citibank.com is at 192.168.0.1 (It's an example). If the dns server you normally query has been poisened, it could potentially give you 10.0.0.1 (that's an example too). 10.0.0.1 could be a quick 0 day citibank look alike setup in korea with the sole purpose of grabbing your username,password,acct number, etc.
The real citibank.com would never know that this happened, and there is a real chance the person who ran your dns server wouldn't know either.
There are no 10 minute preventative measures one could do to protect themselves on this one, outside of using a known good dns resolver. Even then, you have to know the the dns server the resolver uses is good...
The "no" part is that virtually nobody does this. All the protection in the world is useless if you don't use it. Further, the protections that do exist (such as those I mentioned) get redesigned a little too often, making wide-scale rollouts a real problem.
Routers are another key part of the infrastructure where there is plenty in place that COULD prevent poisoning, but where actual use in the "Real World" is limited. If DNS ever does improve, then scammers may well simply shift to poisoning router tables to achieve the same results.
The resources spent on producing quality and security are phenominal. The resources spent on actually putting these into practice can barely be detected with the best tunneling electron microscopes.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I for One welcome.........
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Unprotected DDNS (dynamic dns registration, Microsoft loves this one)
And also you can feed a slave server your own zone, based on the nameserver configuration, it will work (very rarely).
Start by clicking the "HERE" in the article and, oh, wow, there's a whole report on how it happens!
- AMW
I guess that when this is eventually blocked, and spammers -really- are out of ideas of what to do next, it's time for the ninja-midgets-phase :
A spammer will employ stealth ninja midgets (or clone them), that will roam around the world causing havoc by typing in their master's URL in your browser, while you're out to get a snack.
The article is about DNS Cache poisoning, not DNS spoofing. In DNS cache poisoning you're effectively telling the victim's DNS server to query your (fake) server for all of a class of requests (ie *.com), instead of the one it should be querying. DNS spoofing only tries to fool reverse lookups.
From TFA:
The worst part about DNS cache poisoning is that it affects DNS nodes underneath it in the hierarchy. So if you're below a Windows DNS that gets attacked, you yourself may be subject even if your local DNS is in fact secure.
Oh, and fear caching http proxy servers that touch DNS servers that get poisoned. They can keep the bad data around for a long time.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
...(snip..)
Dave Kennedy, director of research services at Herndon, Va.-based Cybertrust (formerly TruSecure), had this to say about the reports: "It's been nearly a month since SANS started ringing their alarm bells over this and maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I'm grading this as hype until I see some independent support."
Russ Cooper, Cybertrust's chief technologist, put it this way: "In my opinion, our industry's creditiblity comes from further reports from multiple sources. We run a very large operation worldwide, and we've looked for signs of what SANS is talking about, but we're just not seeing it."
All of this may seem like an academic debate to those who claim to have been victimized by these attacks.
On March 24, Ken Goods, a computer network administrator for a mid-sized insurance company in Idaho, learned that the company's DNS servers had been attacked when employees began reporting that their Internet browsers were being redirected to a Web site hawking generic Viagra and other prescription drugs.
"I kept trying to go to Google to research the problem, but even though my Web browser said I was at Google.com, the only content that showed up was this pharmacy site," said Goods, who asked that his employer not be named because the company is still in the process of fixing the problem.
John, a systems administrator for a major U.S.-based manufacturing company, said a DNS poisoning attack like the one SANS described last month led to Internet problems for roughly 8,000 of his company's 20,000 employees. John asked that his surname and employer's identity be omitted from this story because the company is trying to determine if it is still vulnerable.
In the following weeks, several more attacks ensued that sent victims at John's company to Web sites advertising penis-enlargement pills.
Marcus Sachs, director of SANS and a former White House cyber-security adviser, said the security industry's response to their alerts about the attacks has been little more than a collective "yawn." Meanwhile, Sachs said, it appears the Internet connection at a San Diego hotel where the organization is holding its annual conference this week also was hit with a poisoning attack (the guy at the hotel who handles Web site security hasn't yet returned my calls.)
"People are waving this off and saying 'This is nothing new, we've seen this kind of thing before, let's move on.' But the consensus amongst the SANS folks is that something doesn't feel right here, and that there's more to this story than meets the eye. We feel like there's something deeper going on here, but the fact is there are not a lot of people out there in the security industry who are willing to dig deep and get to the bottom of this."
...because you never know who you're dealing with.
"Free advice from a top security consultant at Foundstone. (you'd know my name)"
OK. I call bullshit. I spent 30 minutes looking through the Foundstone corporate directory and there is no "Anonymous Coward", "A. Coward", etc.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
DJB has talked about it at least as far back as November 2001.
libresolv problems,talking about poissoning
Je ne parle pas francais.
Ever heard of a monoculture? It's dangerous. That's the primary reason Microsoft has so many security issues. To guard against this, the DNS infrastructure of the internet is intentionally made to be heterogeneous. They use different DNS software on different operating systems as much as possible.
Top security consultant? Doubtful. More likely an AC trying (and failing) to impersonate someone with a clue.
Running dnscache which is much more intelligent about how it handles cacheable data than BIND is high on my recommendations list.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Damn, if only I had checked the "turn on security" box!!
From MSFT (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241352/EN-US/)
How very wrong you are.
Win2k DNS automatically turns on "secure cache against pollution" in SP3+. Read about it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316786/EN-US/. Specifically, you're looking for this quote:
Win2k DNS servers with this feature turned on are STILL vulnerable. I know because my DNS servers are configured this way and I began to suffer from the DNS poisoning on Thursday of last week. It took me until Friday to get a real handle on what was happening. Slashdot ignored my submission of this story back then. They were too busy jerking around with April Fool's stories.
When I was young, I had a severe DNS poisoning at school, and the teacher allowed me to go home.
Wrote about this today in his blog:
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/
He provides some background and comments from companies effected by the attacks. And he offers some opposing views from SANS and Symantec Corp. on whether this is a serious concern or not.
Except that there is nothing to say that the 0 day server would have to even offer the person encryption (So the person wouldn't be prompted for an invalid certificate).
Unless the person actually noticed the secure symbol missing from their browser, they would never know. I doubt many people notice this missing.
Even if they did notice the secure symbol missing, it's likely they would think to themselves "Well, maybe it only shows up AFTER I log in.", in a case like that, they'd be a little too late...
For months now, since at *least* the first of January. It's mostly been google.com, redirecting to some odd webpage, but not any of the ones listed.
I figured the problem is that I was pointing to an old DNS server for SBC. They won't give you the IPs of the new DNS servers unless you fire up their awful PPPoE program. We use Linux, and this incident has been an excuse to remove the last few Windows computers from the network. It'll probably also be an excuse to rid ourselves of SBC's horrendous services.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
C.E.R.T. (Computer Emergency Response Team) is the agency you're thinking of. They probably have said lots about this and nobody listened. Just like when they warned people to use any browser besides Internet Explorer, yet if you go to any library and check the public access terminals, or into any government agency and check, you'll still see IE on ALL of them.
I myself don't want the US government (or any countries government) in charge of the internet - Governments can't be trusted not to abuse any authority they get. They always have, and until humans are much, much wiser than we currently are they will continue doing so.
Tommy
Open Source for Open Minds
If you bothered to RTFA, you would also know that the problem is with Windows NT servers (that should have been taken offline years ago or upgraded to Linux) and Unix machines that were compromised (probably also not up to date). No upgrade in bind will help you on that one and NT is famous for being full of holes. Don't sweat it though, "experts" are dated quickly in this field.
Encourage people to keep their systems up to date, patched and watched would be better. Do integrety checking - like with tripwire. Check it every day. Even then you can still get burned, happens to the best of us.
Now, how do I get one of those fancy $450/hr jobs (No moving to Boston!)?
"(Basically, the UNIX-based stuff has been secure against cache poisoning for quite some time, but there may always be a bug or design flaw that is discovered. We are not quite sure why Microsoft left a default configuration to be unsecure in NT4 and 2000. (Exercise to reader: insert Microsoft security comment/opinion/joke here, but keep it to yourself)."
mmphm...!
ATTENTION: ALERT LEVEL UPDATE. The authorities at SANS (Sebben-Affilliated Network Security) have issued this network alert update:
The DNS cache poisoning alert has been upgraded from "Yellow" to "Blackwatch Plaid." Repeat: DNS cache poisoning alert level is now at Blackwatch Plaid.
Available information does not yet justify a further upgrade to alert level "Moving Pictures."
And for everyone's safety and security, and to preserve our way of life, SANS is taking a drastic step and installing a network monitor. Just one. For safety, security, and omniscient, unblinking information gathering of everyone's activities.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
When I directed my friends to locate Spybot Search And Destroy via Google, they got redirected to a software site that claimed to be Spybot Search and Destroy - but the software would not CLEAN infected systems unless you paid. What you end up installing, of course, just installs MORE spyware.
So when you point freinds to Spybot Search and Destroy, you've got to give them the actual download link.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
For goodness' sake, guys! +5 Funny, not +4 Interesting!
You'd think people would get suspicious when they read things like "poison the DNS cyber buffer", but that's probably expecting too much of the typical mod-point wielding slashdotter.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Moderators, wake up and mark parent down (or at least funny, or troll)!
Several severe reality problems with this "advice" (it's surely a troll, people - come on, "DNS cyber buffer?"):
While that's a sure fire way of killing cache poisoning for your own records, setting DNS TTL to 0 for all records *will* cause severe Internet Armageddon as the root DNS servers explode (client DNS servers would be screwed in short order as well).
Since DNS is a distributed system, run by admins clueful and otherwise, setting DNS TTL to 0 everywhere is not possible (short of owning every single DNS server out there).
Further, setting DNS TTL to 0 does nothing to prevent caching of records on your own DNS server (and serving it to your clients).
Yes.
What was written in that dialog again?
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
First, contrary to what some people think, to access a site with HTTPS which has a certificate, you do NOT contact the CA over the internet. This is because your browser already has the public key of that CA installed. The signature of the certificate you are shown by the real or fake site is verified/rejected not by looking something else up on the internet, but by performing cryptographic tests against that installed public key of the CA. This is not only an efficient process, it is much more secure (for the spoofing reasons you suggest).
That's if you're talking about SSL stuff. If you are talking about the digital signature of the file(s) from windows update, you're using a very similar approach. I don't know the details of Windows Update, but I'll bet there is a local public key or set of keys from MS that are used to check the signature...nothing to download or look up over the internet.
If I explained that rather poorly, I apologize. I just wanted to express that, contrary to what most people think, you do NOT use connections to the CA to verify a certificate.
DNS poisoning is not new. Using it for fraud is new. Defending against it (if you're Google) is difficult, but not impossible.
..
I swear -- Technical people need to stop addressing these problems with solutions that are technically elegant but unrealistic.
Yeah, lets secure all the nameservers on the Net! sure that'll work. Hell, we've only been doing DNS poisoning attacks for what? 12 years or so? hey well at least we finally got sendmail secure. Doh!
The only way we're going to be able to stop bad guys is to start having applications that use more than one protocol to verify integrity AND start building in stronger indepedent crypto behind the scenes making it much much much harder to spoof. You don't have to change the whole protocol stack we just need to share more information across protocols. Right now, when you compromise one protocol, you own the box. Aiiee!
I'm actually happy this happened -- because I've felt the Net needed a big overhaul for a while. My parents can't safely use the Internet, neither can yours. And all us gunslingers who could keep them safe are too busy securing our damn nameserver, and dealing with joe jobs to do anything about it. The solution requires a more comprehensive look at the problem.
If the bad guys are specifically targeting google with DNS poisoning, it's reasonable to assume it will undermine peoples faith in Google. (ATTENTION FLAMERS: YES, I am aware the request was hijacked long before it got to Google -- but the end user won't be because they don't have a clue what DNS stands for or how it works).
Seriously - your mom/dad would take away from an explanation of DNS hijacking was "Go to google, get a virus" (read the previous article posted earlier today about how people don't understand technobabble)
Does anybody else besides me find this whole thing incredibly ironic? People will see Google as being the problem, even though it's almost definitely Microsofts fault. Damn.. sucks to be Google. (Okay, yeah.. honestly i'd love to have Googlesque problems, but also the Googlesque resources to solve them!)
Anyway I think this sort of article hopefully illustrates to Google why they need to start promoting a secure browser WHICH isn't subject to malware attacks such as IE really is in their best interest -- and although it has a minimal cost impact to them, it has a huge long term impact to the net community. Honestly, I believe if Google offered a "safer" online experience -- i'd put my parents on it in a second, I think everybody here would too. I don't trust Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, etc. or any of those companies with the tender care of my parents Internet experience.
I say Google - rather than just "firefox", because if Google put Gbrowser on their homepage you know it'd have a 30% usershare virtually overnight -- maybe more. They install the google toolbar, it transmits information about where you're surfing to google -- BUT it also checks with Google to make sure you're at a "safe site" --
OKAY so you want a real example -- how about a simple one -- why not a modified robots.txt with an entry that included a list of the valid IP's for the SOA for your root domain for the next 30 days. Boom, they already pick up robots.txt -- BUT now they can authenticate that the DNS wasn't posioned using google toolbar. Sexy huh?
I've got lots of ideas like this -- there are probably 5 things sites could *OPTIONALLY* do, that merge application stacks -- but at the same time it would make it necessary for a phiser to compromise MULTIPLE hosts, across MULTIPLE protocols -- thereby making it *statistically* impossible.
(NOTE: If I seem brilliant it's only because i'm standing on the shoulders of Giants. I love how SPF uses DNS to authenticate mail servers -- it's non-intrusive, but an illustrative example of the types of solutions that we as a technical community need to solve problems)
A friend of mine was obsessively tracking a fed ex package of his and told us the progress of it a couple times a day. There happen to be a big hurricane happening, but it wasn't quite in the path of his package's travel. So, I wgett'ed (wgot?) fedex's site and made my own modifications. I just changed the hosts file on my friend's machine to point to my webserver. My friend watched his package get closer and closer, then looked in horror as it took a detour to florida. The next day it was in the fedex damaged package center, and we had to let him in on the joke.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
He said "Hey, I thought it was supposed to be free, but they're asking me for my credit card number!" He quickly realized it was a scam site, but many others will not.
Perhaps this is also what you friend did. I just googled for Spybot Search and Destroy, and the first sponsored ad is for noAdware.net which itself is spyware.
There's no incentive for Google to prevent this because they're making money. I wonder if slashdotters could nickel-and-dime the scammers to death. Firefox costs ~ $0.10, Spybot ~ $0.20. Let's try, firefox and spybot - click all the scam Sponsored Ads you see. Repeatedly if desired.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
But, mister Rimmer sir, you do realize that it means changing the lightbulb...
Don't click that link! I clicked it and got a really nasty porn site.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Easy way to get on the FBI's most wanted list. You try to hijack fbi.gov, and you'll end up on the most wanted list even if you fail.
I told you so!
Time to stop running BIND and Windows, people.
djbdns is easier to set up by leaps and bounds, anyway.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?