Hunting for Botnet Command and Controls

Uky writes "Convinced that the recent upswing in virus and Trojan attacks is directly linked to the creation of botnets for nefarious purposes, a group of high-profile security researchers is fighting back, vigilante-style. The objective of the group, which operates on closed, invite-only mailing lists, is to pinpoint and ultimately disable the C&C (command-and-control) infrastructure that sends instructions to millions of zombie drone machines hijacked by malicious hackers." From the article: "Using data from IP flows passing through routers and reverse-engineering tools to peek under the hood of new Trojans, Thompson said the researchers are able to figure out how the botnet owner sends instructions to the compromised machines."

Comments

Violation of My Privacy?

[reporter]

"Using data from IP flows passing through routers and reverse-engineering tools to peek under the hood of new Trojans, Thompson said the researchers are able to figure out how the botnet owner sends instructions to the compromised machines."

When the security "experts" are busy looking at all the data passing through routers, who is busy ensuring that the "experts" will not violate my privacy by reading the personal but sensitive e-mail notes that I send to my friends and associates?

In other words, when the "experts" are protecting me from the hackers, who is protecting me from the "experts"?

Self destruct the botnets?

[dyftm]

What would be really interesting is if using a combination of honeypot PCs (to match trojans to controllers) and the commands used to control the botnets, these vigilantes could make the zombified PCs download and run a cleaning tool to rid themselves of the trojan.

Re:Self destruct the botnets?

[coekie]

Which is exactly what *does* happen a lot. This is a "hobby" of many "vigilantes"
Some drones have builtin uninstall commands, others have commands to download and execute programs, so cleaners are written.
But the drones are getting more and more advanced, builtin uninstall commands are getting more rare... it is clearly a battle that can not be won if only fought this way.

Good for them.

[deacon]

From the FAS:

a group of high-profile security researchers is fighting back, vigilante-style.

This emotionally laden language has been deliberately chosen to make it sound like this activty is a "bad thing [tm]"

I truly believe it is the duty of every person to fight against clearly evil activity.

This includes a mugger hitting an old lady, a middle age man trying to drag a pre-teen girl (or boy) in to a car idiling in the street, and a person trying to kick in the door of the elderly couple down the street.

If the people disabling bot-nets make every effort to be certain they do not harm innocent or uninvolved people (and the standard here is very high), then they are doing a public service. (if they take the attitude, like some "anti-spam" people, of -> 'kill them all, let God sort them out, they are just assholes with very, very small peckers')

Those who believe the gub'mint is going to be johnny on the spot to fix all your boo-boos are sadly misguided: there is neither the manpower or the reaction time to fix everything "bad" in the world. That depends on YOU.

What's good for the goose...

[argStyopa]

So, how is this different from a "Star Chamber"?

I'd be interested to see how many people in /. who might applaud this pro-active white-hattery, who simultaneously strenuously object to the US Patriot act which is pretty much just allowing the government to do the same thing in real life?

Re:C&C?

[sbma44]

I thought there was no such thing as a central C&C on botnets. An infected pc, can be a member of many botnets.

Yes, but there'll be one trojan per botnet. Script kiddies don't like to share, and in fact the current trend is supposedly groups assembling botnets and then auctioning off their services to spammers. Given that, you can see why the botnet "owner" wouldn't want to allow access to other evildoers.

Not a problem for long...

[Mercury2k]

Hey guys. Just thought that I would put my $0.02 in.

I am not into botnets anymore, but like most here prolly', I started my internet life on irc. And anyone else who grew up on non dalnet like servers with chan services knows that being on a network without them can be a pain. Especially when smacktards show up for the day ;)

Anyways, knowing a bit about bot's and botnets, I would say that it shouldnt be too hard to take some down. Being irc based, plain text would be one problem. But if you have access to a machine infected, encryption would be pointless since you could just debug the program and find out what it 's protocol is anyways. I think one big issue that was hinted at in one of the above posts was that you should be able to use an infected machine to "take over" the botnet. Well, things dont work that way. For those of you that havent run one or used one before, I will give you a rough idea of what the ones in my day (1.1.15 or so IIRC).

A botnet is basically a shell like environment similar to say a bash shell or a dos prompt. ie: its all text commands using plain ol' ascii. Commands generally start with a ".", like ".help". The botnet also has security systems in place (ie: users with passwords etc) that define who can dcc chat the bot directly, use its !channel commands on irc etc. The eggdrop (sorry, yes, im refering to eggdrop's specifically) bot also has the ability to link multiple bots togethere to form a big "botnet". The is all of course done with special bot accounts with unique passwords.

The reason you cant just take one over (despite it probably being a modified version of this system of bot), is because the other bots are probably only allowed to "take orders" from a specific machine or user. Although for simiplicity sake, I would imagine its just a user and password combo to prevent any traceable information from being gleamed over the botnet traffic. Dont forget to that the botnet would be point to point and most of the traffic would only be coming from a single location (which you would have to find out from a comprimised machine).

In the end, I see the biggest problem in finding the zombies being, how do you tell when a machines infected if the virus tries the best it can to hide itself from non-forensic integrity checking tools. But, over the years I can see software taking a turn to being better checked for authenticity and integrity etc. Once we hit that point, botnets would probably start to disappear. Also consider that the machines themselevs will go offline and be replaced by newer ones that arent suceptable to the same malicious code. This at least forces them to keep active. And keeping them active helps you trace them.

Anyways, hope you had a fun read. Not worth previewing this one, l8r.

Re:Anti-anti-botnet

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

No point in treeing it, trees lead to an origin too easily. Cell-style works so much better. Each peer has to discover eachother (Start with the machine that infected it, get the current list of peers from it. randomly ping each peer to see if one drops off, if so send a hint to your other peers. All hints only cause verification, not actually removing. Same for adding new peers this way.
Controlling it is then a matter of keysigned commands. All commands are timestamped to be unique(so you can easily discard duplicate messages), and is verified with the public key. The only way you can be exposed at the leader is if you get caught with the private key.