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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."
Now only if they could do this with Skynet, we might just be able to postpone Judgement Day another 6 years.
Easiest way is to create a small IRC network, and submit the name to all the irc clients out there, so it'll be in the list. Also, name it something so it appears at the top or near the top...
To inflate user counts, just get an ircd that allows assigning yourself or others fake hostnames (for certain hosts/etc). Then load tons of bots in channels pretending to be 'users'. You could even get creative and make them idely chatter with each other..
Anyways, the point is that most of these botnet peoples eventually want to take a part of their net out to go mess with irc channels, and they usually seem to target smaller networks on the top of whatever list they're using.. So all ya gotta do if just log massive joins into certain channels, or when a flood of users magically connect to your fake network.. Then you have tons of bots to dissect or whatever.
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"?
So is this news something to be pessimistic about or what? As I understand it, without vigilantes botnets would be even more "unstoppable" than they are now. It's cool that they're mitigating it, but it really comes down to getting some cooperation going on multiple levels... starting with the ISPs acting more against outgoing malicious traffic for a start.
see a Text Widget
The problem isn't botnets, the problem is people and systems. The only reason botnets exist is due to the fact that current software is engineered without much thought toward security, and vendor supplied patches are not applied. Shutting down a botnet is at most only minimally worth the effort as the hosts are still vulnerable to be aquired by the next virus that comes around.
The only solution is secure software engineering and prompt, reliable patching.
Internet ages ago, when DDOS was hot and researchers all concentrated on that threat, I tried to tell them that DDOS is nothing. Stuart and the others wrote their paper and based the threat on DDOS which influences computer security research even today. I predicted what is now called botnets would be the more frightening destination of the DDOS train. I didn't catch that IRC would be the covert channel of choice (not very covert). HTTPS seemed much more likely to me - net admins expect to see https traffic.
/. user name
The vigilantes are running into the problem of cut-outs. The original botnets for DDOS all used a three-tier architecture - slaves (bots), masters (IRC servers), and clients. The current incarnation seems to have at least that many layers if not more. Killing the masters is better than trying to stomp on all the bots, but that still leaves the clients. Until the owners of the compromised boxen acting as masters allow access to track back to the clients, the vigilantes are facing the fate of Sisyphus.
Goetz - AC because I can't remember my
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.
But it doesn't hurt anyone else much either as I'm on a 56k line. Oh, scary DOS comming from that.
What you're saying shows the root of the problem and why it's so hard to solve: you need some level of cooperation from people who do not have a direct interest in solving it simply because it doesn't affect them. Sure, your little 56k is quite harmless, but with 1000 zombies on little 56 lines, you can create quite a flood.
The other problem is with using up bandwidth allotments. Let's say the attacker is using 2KB/s for flooding. You won't notice that, but the other end wastes 5GB/month. Now if you have just 200 56k lines on pumping this on average, you'll be driving the target into unwanted bandwidth bills for sure. Now this analysis is making some assumptions, but you get the picture.
see a Text Widget
C&C attacks are the staple of today's military. An organized, centralized effort should do wonders for laying waste to the economic value (and motivation) behind such behavior.
The best way to lay waste to someone's economic power in C&C is to destroy their harvesters. Make sure not to send infantry units because they'll suffer tiberium poisoning, or merely be run over by the harvester. Another great way to wreak havoc is to send the engineer into the harvesting facility as the harvester is unloading, you'll get the building, harvester and the tiberium thats being unloaded at the time. Of course, many believe engineering cheese is the cheap way to play C&C, but of course there are too many cheesy plays to count in that game. I suggest you play something like Starcraft. Or Starcraft2, which I have a chance of actually helping with.
God spoke to me.
Well, obviously script kiddies with the malice and idiocy to create them. But also, the end users ... the people who irresponsibly leave their machine open to the 'net, get 0wned, and then contribute to whatever DoS is going on.
These end users just *don't care*. Because, although their owned boxen are f-ing with the rest of the internet, it doesn't affect them - a selfish luser attitude, why should they bother virus/trojan scanning their boxen?
I wish ISPs would hold the lusers (criminally) responsible for this. I for one look after my home datacentre, including my Gentoo Linux boxen and keep them patched.
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.
I can't find it on his site, but the guy who runs DShield was under a DDOS attack a few years ago and he managed to crack into the IRC channel the attacker used to control his bot network.
Apparently the attacker about crapped his drawers when instead of the usual bot replies to his commands an actual person started talking to him in his IRC channel.
http://dshield.org/
Wax on, wax off baby!
... fighting back the internet scumbags all over the planet, vigilante style...
...
Now if they could just have a cool name, we could have a new hit superheroes movie for this summer.
Any suggestion anyone ?
- The League of Net Shadows
- The League of Extraordinay Nerds
- The Fantastic Fourty
Come on give me something better
So, how is this different from a "Star Chamber"?
/. 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?
I'd be interested to see how many people in
-Styopa
This isn't flamebait, he's making a point.
Most 'normal' users really don't seem to give a damn if their computeris being hijacked, as long as they don't notice it. And the same users won't undertand that their 56k line is one of many, which adds up to an enormous amount of bandwidth.
Wipe themselves out how? They probably don't have self-destruct routines,
1. Its more code weight, harder to transport, run, and create.
2. The bot virus writers have probably read the villiany HOWTO which advises against installing a self-destruct device because invariably the hero will use it as a very easy means to destroy the superweapon.
The main reason for this is that nobody in power has been afflicted by this.
The moment one of these BotNet's decides to DDOS the servers at the capitol building or start attacking other aspects of the US internet infrastructure, your congressman isn't going to give a shit.
The internet and the laws governing it are the wildwest at the moment. Some corners have very strong laws, other corners have none. However, if I remember it was the vigilantes who took care of the areas that strong law hadn't come into play.
Vigilante groups are a double edged sword. Laws generally aren't as agile as a group of people working for the common good. However, there is a danger that any group of people once given power is generally adverse to giving it up. Also the argument about what "common good" is gets nebulous. We all agree that child porn sites should be taken down and their proprieters chucked into wood chipppers. What happends when you get a vigilante group that feels that all porn sites are bad?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I know a user who I'm certain his system is totally 0wn3d. Its an unpatched windows 98 machine, no firewall, nothing. I put an EICAR string on his machine, and 6 months later, its still there. He calls them "Cheezy Viruses that don't hurt me" if they don't interfere with his day-to-day operations. Only when he got a dialer and built up $10,000 worth of phone bills one month did he care. The moral of the story: Users don't give a damn. I know a guy who happens to run a rather large botnet and he says 90% of his victims know there is a virus on their computers, they just can't be arsed to do anything about it.
Waffles rock.
I thought there was no such thing as a central C&C on botnets. An infected pc, can be a member of many botnets. Today a pc is doing the bidding of joe hax0r, tomorrow is doing the bidding of billy rox0r. Even if you shut down one C&C, the thousands of infected pcs, remain infected and ready to join another botnet.
The only sollution is user education.
VStrider.
This is a blatant violation of the trojans' EULAs if I ever saw one. The authors put a lot of work into writing those trojans. What gives "security researchers" such a sense of entitlement to that code? If they want to analyze malware, they should write their own!
The trouble with cutting off the head is that you end up with a perfectly good army just waiting for a suitable leader to come along... and we all saw how well that worked for Yoda.
The computers that form the botnet are still compromised and are still just as dangerous. If they have a hard-coded IP address to receive instructions from the vigilantes can make sure that IP address doesn't issue instructions but if the instructions are received in a less centralised way then I can't see how they could stop the instructions being sent.
Maybe what we need is a follow up deconstruction of the command protocol to allow an effective "self destruct" command to be sent. (Obviously there won't be a self destruct command but there is often the ability to download a new binary file and execute it.)
Sig matters not. Judge me by my sig, do you?
If I were a Blackhat, my counter to this would be to have the members of the botnet relay my commands among themselves like a telephone relay tree where one person calls 5 who each then call 5 who each then ... To find Mr. Big, you'd have to find the headwaters of the stream, which would be a difficult task.
The proper acronym for command and control is C2. Not C&C. Add comunications to that and you get C3. Add computers to that and you get C4. Add intelligence to that and you get C4i.
Actually you are wrong. Many of the pieces of malware I have reverse engineered have had a "self-destruct" mechanism built in which basically just deleted the exe and any registry entries associated with starting the malware. Not exactly massive amounts of code...
As soon as you find the magic word to make the bots respond to you (which can be difficult at times, some of the malware writers are pretty sneaky) shutting a botnet down can be as simple as logging into the irc server and appropriate channel and typing a couple of words. The problem comes in when the botnet owners are keeping close tabs on the channels and ban any clients that don't behave just right. At that point you have to go to the trouble of having your irc client mimmic the behavior of the botnet clients so that you will go unnoticed long enough to get the information you need to shutdown the botnet.
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.
The bots would be connected to their own P2P-ish system. Commands would be passed around the network in a method similar to searches in Gnutella.
All commands would by signed by my private key. My bots would all have my public key. This, I would be *the only person* who could issue valid commands to my botnet.
This would make it impossible to tell where the commands are coming from since the originator would look just like another bot on the network.
I may be missing something here, but if IRC is used to control malicious programs, then why allow IRC? /dev/null (or a logging system) and then annihilate any IRC bot-controllers in your system.
Call me a stick in the mud, but I have simply never seen the purpose of IRC. I've installed programs for it, logged into the LUG's channels because I'm told it's the best thing since sliced bread, found it to be a an utter waste of time, and removed the IRC client. Three times. I simply can't see any purpose to it that is worth either the massive time waste (people don't think before they reply to questions), or the huge security hole that it appears to be. [BTW for people on AberLUG, I know there's a no-install Java access route too. But there's no content.]
So why are people (network administrators, specifically) allowing the packets to pass? You've got a problem with, say, your AS chunk of routing space being full of IRC-controlled robot machines. So set your router to forward all IRC packets (in- or out-bound) to
If IRC has some value (which I have yet to be shown an argument for, let alone be convinced by such an argument ; "Look at this, it's kewl!" is not an argument), then tell the developers who claim so to come up with an IRC-like system which is provably secure and that provides the functionality they want without the security risks. Any of the security risks. Which returns to the original point - what is the "value" of IRC that people tolerate the security risks that appear to be inherent in the model.
Question: What did people do for rapid networked communication between self-selected groups before someone (whoever) invented IRC? Answer : mailing lists and/or private newsgroups on non-peering, non-usenet NNTP servers.
Question: What is still a major method of rapid networked communication amongst self-selected groups? Answer: mailing lists (and private newsgroups too, but often less visible than the lists). Did you notice that SourceForge provides this functionality? You think it's there to make the menus longer, or for some other reason?
If it causes pain, and you've got an alternative, stop doing it.
BTW, who was responsible for this junk? I remember something similar being available on Compuserve when I joined in 1992, but it was unusable then and hasn't got any better since.
It is possible that the security risks of IRC are consequent on the possibility of being anonymous on the communication system. That may account for a lot of the junk too. Although the IRC-like stuff in Compuserve was on a private network with personal accountability through credit-card-backed account identifiers, and that was pretty content-free.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"