New IM Worm Installs Own Web Browser

Aquafinality writes "A new IM worm discovered recently takes the novel step of installing its own web browser onto the victims PC. Ironically titled "The Safety Browser", its default settings actually make your PC less secure - switching on pop-ups, changing your home page and hijacking your desktop with a looped music track that plays every time you switch your computer on. It's clear people cannot resist clicking "yes" to anything they're presented with via IM - with this in mind, what on Earth can we do so stop the spread of garbage like the above? To put it another way, will reducing the amount of potential "suckers" out there dissuade the bad guys from coming up with ever-more elaborate ideas such as this latest scam? Or is IM safety a lost cause?"

Comments

IM safety?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Or is IM safety a lost cause?

It's very hard to stop people executing something thats sent to them by someone they know - but for other vector methods, perhaps people should consider an IM client that doesn't include activeX

Anyway, mildly interesting, the worm makes no attempt to hide iteself with a "You are beaten, it is useless to resist" desktop paper (!) and music on startup (from TFA) Worse still, music starts to blare out of your PC. Not just any old music - bad music. Bad looped music, with screeching guitars and awful drum n' bass beats.

But not to worry XP SP2 users, you're protected.... again from TFA:

Some "good" news, however - SP2 seems to prevent this music from playing in the background.

snigger.... :-)

Re:IM safety?

[OffTheLip]

"Some "good" news, however - SP2 seems to prevent this music from playing in the background." Since Napster is out and other P2P apps will land me in jail I was hoping this music would be a way to add to my MP3 collection. Damn SP2!

Re:IM safety?

[The_Abortionist]

I agree with your statement saying that it's hard to prevent people from executing stuff, regardless of the media used to propagate viruses, spyware, etc.

However, I think that it also underlines a serious flaw in the Windows security model. Almost everybody runs with administrator privileges because too many things just don't work otherwise. I hope, but doubt, that Windows Vista will address this issue more than simply provide a few anti-spyware utilities.

Re:IM safety?

[jacksonj04]

If you get hold of the CTP, you'll find that Vista actually does this. If something needs to prod around with something which should need admin (Registry, system folder etc) then you will be prompted for your admin password. Even if you're logged in with an admin account, it will ask you again.

Re:IM safety?

[techno-vampire]

However, I think that it also underlines a serious flaw in the Windows security model. Almost everybody runs with administrator privileges because too many things just don't work otherwise.

I'm no Micro$oft fanboi, but don't blame Bill the Gates for this. Blame lazy deveopers who can't be bothered to Do It Right. They run their bleeding edge machines as Admin and never test to see if their bloatware will run any other way. Not only that, they write programs that need every bit of RAM, every CPU cycle and every possible bit of graphics they have so that when they're finished, you have a program that can only be run on a maxed-out machine as Admin. Last, they look down their noses at you if you complain because you're "too cheap" to buy the hardware needed for their precious program. They don't understand that saying, "It works on my machine!" doesn't cut it if the average user can't afford to match their hardware or wants to keep their copmuter safe by not running as Admin.

My advice is, just say NO to programs requiring Admin and never, under any circumstances, upgrade your hardware just to play the newest game. I'm not a Libratarian, but if enough people follow my advice, the market will, indeed, take care of it.

Re:IM safety?

[techno-vampire]

but the whole thing about not upgrading your hardware was pretty dumb. Don't tell me not to upgrade my hardware.

I think you misunderstood. There's no reason not to upgrade your hardware if you want to, and every reason why you should. However, you shouldn't be forced to upgrade simply because some game won't run properly unless you have the Latest And Greatest of everything. If game deveopers want the biggest market possible, write so that your product will run acceptably on whatever is mainstream at the time. Let them have features that need the best hardware, but don't make it a minimum requirement.

There's one game I play that needs a fairly advanced graphics card to get the best out of it, but there are options to turn off features as needed until it's down to whatever you have can handle. Most of them are simply eye candy anyway. The core of the game is fully functional with none of them enabled. That's the right way to do it, and that's how it should be. The game is FOSS, so the developers aren't getting anything except egoboo from it, but they're still writing for as many people as possible. Why can't commercial developers be as considerate?

Again, is it IM's fault?

[yagu]

Once again, fingers pointed at some conduit when the true culprit still seems to be Microsoft's OS. If I were to click the link in gaim, on a linux machine (assume for the sake of argument, this browser is platform independent and would work on a linux box)?

Probably not, because the typical default access for a linux user is unpriveleged (I've been working intensively in the linux environment, and I'll bet I've not been logged in as a priveleged user (i.e., root) more than two or three times a year during that span). But, an extremely significant percentage (I'll bet it's over 80%) of Windows users continue to be logged in with administrative priveleges -- most without knowing and understanding what that even means.

Until there's a more consistent and pervasive culture (come on Microsoft, help out with this... how about a PSA campaing?, you can afford it) where users have non-administrative logins, there's little to be done. I still see people on older machines where they haven't even bothered to configure users for their older Windows machines... and don't have the slightest concept of partitioned separate logins for distinct different users.

This isn't entirely IM's fault.

(In the meantime, if you're a serious PC user and you want some piece of mind, spring for the extra $500 for your own machine and make it yours and yours only. It's how I've set up friends who use their computers for business/profession who've nearly given up on PC technology what with (shared home) machines popping porn, running slowly, and going Toes Up on them. Sigh.)

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I mostly agree with your post - and you put things well, but:

Probably not, because the typical default access for a linux user is unprivileged (I've been working intensively in the linux environment, and I'll bet I've not been logged in as a privileged user (i.e., root) more than two or three times a year during that span).

I'm not sure how long user privilege separation is going to continue to be the great protection it is now, once the majority of desktop users have it. Consider a single user desktop with privilege separation (linux, vista (supposedly) or os x):

1) Malware downloaded & executed by dumb user.
2) Malware sets itself to start at that user's privileges when the user logs in.
3) Malware can do many things at malware level at least when user is logged in (including periodically checking its update server for local privilege escalation exploits it can run).

We're about to enter an age of smarter malware, that takes its time getting root, and keeps a low profile (maybe a little keylogging here or there) until it does... you read it here first :-)

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[IamTheRealMike]

It's not the fault of IM but it's not Windows' fault either. As pointed out by others, privilege separation does not solve malware. Period, end of story, it achieves nothing. Unsurprising given that it was designed to solve an entirely different problem, back in the days when malware didn't exist.

The key problem here is that a program is able to impersonate a user in such a way that other humans can't tell the difference. People are very reliant on trust cues to guide their decision making and computers routinely present incredibly misleading trust cues. Messages that say they are from a friend but actually are not are just evil, and should not be allowed. In practice this means fixing chat programs so that they can't be controlled by other programs and ensuring the local password is encrypted sufficiently well (or simply not stored at all) that a program can't establish a direct network connection.

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[Jeremi]

I think that things like selinux will really help, keeping programmes from doing things which they are not meant to do.

I think using virtual machines as sandboxes could go a long way towards improving security also. Imagine a distro with a super-locked-down secure OS that only ever runs a single app, which is a virtual machine app (VMWare, Xen, whatever). The user does everything inside this virtual machine's guest OS, and never installs or runs any other software on the host OS.

With that setup, it would be easy to "checkpoint" the state of the system and restore it whenever things have gone wrong (due to malware, user mistakes, whatever). (A clever diff-based mechanism might be able to make OS-state saves/restores fast enough to be done automatically in the background, say once a day). Even if the guest OS was completely compromised by malware, it would still be impossible for the malware to prevent the user from using the (uncorrupted) host OS to "rewind" the computer back to before the infection occurred. The host OS could also keep an audit trail of what happened when inside the guest OS, to help the user find out where things went wrong.

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[XXIstCenturyBoy]

Because you think that if you install Linux on Joe Somebody's machine, he will not enter the root password when asked for it?

OSes are as secure as the person using it. To think anything else is ridiculous. And that applies to every OSes.

And I'll get modded down for what I am about to say, but people blame MS for everything, saying they can't do things right, that it should be open source, security through transparency and whatever. But right now, no open source distribution out there is secure if used by a technologicaly challenge user. And some of those open source project have been worked on for years... What is MS to do? Open Windows sources and wait 20 years and go trough 20 forking projects for someone to finally get it right? All the while, only knowledgeable people will have a secure OS?

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[Dan Ost]

Unless you're absolutely confident that there are no way for a local user to
escallate their priviledge, you can't trust anything on your machine after
a user account has been compromised.

I've never had a machine compromised (that I know of), but if I did, I'd
reinstall the box, just to be sure.

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[Iron Condor]

Probably not, because the typical default access for a linux user is unpriveleged (I've been working intensively in the linux environment, and I'll bet I've not been logged in as a priveleged user (i.e., root) more than two or three times a year during that span). But, an extremely significant percentage (I'll bet it's over 80%) of Windows users continue to be logged in with administrative priveleges -- most without knowing and understanding what that even means.

Disclaimer: My experience is with VAX and Unix boxes in the eighties, my first Linux kernel was 0.9something but I have used Windows only since 98SE. I never really got to "learn" windows and am much less clear on the internals. On the "how is this supposed to work".

With more than two decades of serious computing behind me, I still do not understand what "Administrative privileges" really means in Windows. Or what it is good for. In U*X everything is a file and thus those magical "privileges" simply boil down to what you can do with a file (including files in /dev, /proc, directories in general, etc). There's a layer of abstraction where I understand that access to this 644 means that I can only read it, but the owner can write to it as well. That's easy.

In windows, it has never been terribly clear to me -- there appears to be some nod in the direction of file permissions, but all I've ever seen of them is that sometimes I have trouble messing with something the wife has been working on -- that kind of thing. Sometimes there's no problem. Sometimes logging in as admin solves some problem that I have but I hesitate to do so since I nevere really know what Windows does behind the scenes that might become a problem if I were to be logged in as Admin.

In the end, the preferred way to do something that I can't do as user is to fire up cygwin and do it from the linux prompt.

And ours is the rare enlightened case where someone took the trouble of setting up user accounts at install time. It was certainly not in the least obvious when and where to set up this kind of thing. I cannot fathom why I would've bothered with it if I hadn't had a Linux backgroud. It's not like XP pops up a screen during install explaining what an Admin is and how he is distinguished from a normal user.

I still see people on older machines where they haven't even bothered to configure users for their older Windows machines... and don't have the slightest concept of partitioned separate logins for distinct different users.

Of course not - why would they? This is my computer, I'm the only one using it, if the kid gets old enough to want to diddle with it I'll buy him his own computer. Why would I be setting up different "users"? I doesn't make sense in the Windows model.

U*X (and VMS and ...) was developed in a networked multi-user context of universities and research labls. Windows was developed to make one computer do one thing for one user. "Multi-user" is an afterthought. Network security is an afterthought. The entire computer-as-an-appliance model of how a computer should behave in Windows just doesn't lend itself to the notion of a "privileged account". You don't have a privileged account in your toaster or your microwave, do you?

Now it gets hairy: If I grant for a moment that there's no such thing as absolute computer security, then all these unsecured windows boxes out there are just the low-hanging fruit. Viruses and worms are only as smart as they need to be to pick those. This is fine with me as it means I merely have to have my fruit hanging higher than everybody else's. My house doesn't have to be absolutely burglar-proof -- just harder to break into than my neighbors. I'll never be perfectly termite-safe, but as long as I'm more termite-safe than my neighbors, they will attract all the termites. You get the picture.

If geeks succeede in training the masses in making their machines "more secure" it only means that the malwa

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[Jeremi]

That sounds like a great idea, but how can all that be accomplished without a noticeable performance decrease of nearly everything a user runs inside the guest OS?

I'm not sure how well it would work for games, but other than that, it's simple: given that a VM causes a 5-10% slowdown, just buy a computer that is 5-10% faster. :^) Most users won't notice the difference anyway... and if doing it this way means they can get rid of some or all of their current security-ware cruft, then this might actually result in a net speedup.

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[IntlHarvester]

With more than two decades of serious computing behind me, I still do not understand what "Administrative privileges" really means in Windows.

If you understand multiuser security, you understand Windows security. It's basically the same as the Unix model, with a few twists:

+ Administrator is not quite as all-powerful as root -- still bound by ACLs for example
+ ACL permissions apply to not just files but also registry keys
+ There's a policy layer to control who can perform certain actions (setting the clock, installing device drivers, etc).

The entire computer-as-an-appliance model of how a computer should behave in Windows just doesn't lend itself to the notion of a "privileged account". You don't have a privileged account in your toaster or your microwave, do you?

I strongy agree with this sentiment. Multiuser security wasn't designed for personal computing and really only works on the desktop as a kludge. PC security is never really going to work until we have a system that acknowledges that the "user" is not a trust level. Instead, it should be task-oriented. For example, installing software is a high-trust activity, while (say) running Kazaa should be severely locked down.

the malware will become "more clever" and thus that my machine will be less secure than it is now.

The malware is already pretty damn clever in a Windows system programming sense. It's probably unavoidable regardless of the system put in place.

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[RockRampantly]

Not only that, but:

4) Malware can install a keylogger so that when the user legitimately needs super-user access, the malware steals the password
5) Prompt user for Admin password directly (or in the case of Ubuntu for example, the user's own password to run sudo)
6) Even if the malware can't create its own password prompt, but must use a system default prompt:
"Warning! A program is attempting to gain Administrator level access. This should only be necessary to install programs or perform other maintenance. Click Cancel otherwise."

1 -Malware prompts user for password with message above
2 -Naive user reads message, clicks cancel
3 -Malware prompts user again for password
4 -Ad nauseum
5 -User gives up and enters password

Privilege seperation can be useful for preventing automated system takovers, but where a user is involved (and that user can get super-user access) becomes moot.

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[cyber-vandal]

A smarter worm would be a fair bit harder to write, so I should think there will be less of them, at least for a while, for Vista. Preventing programs from installing themselves will lock out a large proportion of the current nasties, preventing registry updates and access to C:\WIN* will lock out a fair few more. I do agree, while people still blindly install any old crap malware will never go away but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been made as hard as possible for it to get on in the first place. Running as admin should've been shifted long before now and the bonehead who thought allowing a web browser to blindly install anything the website wanted it to should be made to admin NT 4.0 servers on crap hardware for a year without a firewall, virus checker or being allowed to install any service packs.

Re:Again, is it IM's fault?

[drsmithy]

Umm ... the local Windows Administrator account (or any account in the local "Administrators Group") is not bound by ACLs.

Yes, it is. There are many things an "Administrator" cannot do.

It can force ownership upon itself when it's not able to automaticly override.

This is a different thing to "not being bound by ACLs".

The unix 'root' user effectively bypasses the entire unix security system. That is, security restrictions simply are not applied if UID=0. The Administrator user can (and does) not do this. Indeed, no account in Windows can do this, as it has no concept of a "superuser".

Users

[hotsauce]

Lost cause. Next article please.

Re:Users

[Allnighterking]

Let me be the first to point out something..... YOU are a user. Yep So if all users and dumb, and you are a user, then you too are dumb. If you are dumb then your statement looses validity.

In my mind we need to drop the Microsoft/Apple attitude that users = idiot. If you build systems for idiots only idiots will use your system. Generally I've found that the #1 reason users I work with generally do stupid things because I've either, Improperly documented or explained what something did or how it worked, or because I created something that blocked their ability to do their job.

Very often users tend to view the people at help desks as idiots because regardless of problem the reaction and lack of willingness to care are obvious from the start. Even cultural attitudes are ignored in the move to "cater to the idiot who uses our product" In one contry clucking your tounge may be a sign of rapt attention. But in the country the user is in it may be a sign of a smug and condiscending attitude.

In one of the first lessons taught in management classes you will learn that a team of idiots is lead by an idiot. I claim that the same is true here as well. If you have idiots for users it's because you have idiots for techs.

It seems there's only one thing we can do.

[Ant P.]

Make "Yes" buttons, by default, HURT people physically.

Re:It seems there's only one thing we can do.

[nbannerman]

The first person to combine a goatse popup with your idea gets a million quid bonus ;)

Re:It seems there's only one thing we can do.

[jZnat]

And on a more serious note, you could instead make modal dialogue boxes use better buttons than "Yes", "No", "OK", "Cancel", and "Reset". Verbs are good (e.g. "Install", "Remember", and "Unknowingly Submit Social Security Number and Credit Card Numbers to Random Company").

Re:It seems there's only one thing we can do.

[Pheersome]

I refer you to Gabe's experience with such.

safety

[joe 155]

I think safety is always going to be hard to push on people who don't seem to understand the importance of what you are telling them. I'm sure you'll know from your own experience how hard it is to get even your own parents to take adequate security steps. I don't understand what this virus is doing though surely you would notice a new browser and remove it? certainly not use it...

As for removing the incentive for people to do this I think it will be hard; there will always be a few "suckers" and even 1 in a million can be profitable; so it'll be hard to stop it.

Yes

[IamTheRealMike]

• Block transmission of executables at the server level
• Use something like CoreForce to prevent IM clients executing other programs (and switch "open this file" type actions via a privilege mux or RPC to a higher privileged system service).
• Use operating system level services to prevent any application scripting another, restricting that privilege to accessibility applications.

Re:Yes

[Tony-A]

The users cannot be trusted, so the OS needs to make it impossible to do something stupid.

Hogwash.
A few years of this approach and compromised computers are going for five cents each. (Must be big money in (lots of) very cheap computers)

Trying to make it impossible to do something stupid actually works like this. The apparent burden is shifted from the user (who probably has priorities not easily guessed correctly by the OS) to the OS which can handle a very few cases, and those rather poorly.

"Are you sure?" Sure of what? If the OS asks that general a question (to determine whether to proceed or not), this assumes that the user is competent enough to divine the context in which the question occurs as well as somehow knowing the correct answer. All of this WITHOUT any clue from the OS as to what is going on.
?? This is the OS that is going to make it impossible to do something stupid ??

There are things that can be done to somewhat de-booby-trap the system, and these are useful and should be done. They make things a bit safer. They cannot make things safe. When you get enough accidents, you do things to as cheaply and easily as possible prevent those kinds of accidents from repeating readily.

Sensationalism

[Toby The Economist]

> Or is IM safety a lost cause?

The question is sensationalist given the context.

The article describes a particular new threat - all good and well.

However, no information on the distribution of IM attacks is given. We have no idea if they are rare or frequent. How can it then be asked if IM safety is a lost cause? the question is almost orthagonal to the article; one cannot have a meaningful opionion about IM safety in general given only information about the *existance* of a particular, new threat.

IM is a communications tool

[markdavis]

As others have said, and no doubt will continue to say, you will not change the masses' behavior. The problem is not that people will click on things that look interesting, the problem is that the program will execute something presented to it.

There is no reason that *any* instant message client should ever execute other code, privileged or not. That is not the purpose of IM- IM is not a program launcher, it is a tool for communication.

Awww

[LiquidCoooled]

Its for Windows and Internet Explorer only :(

Why can't this run on Linux?

Geeks want to know

[Giant Ape Skeleton]

The question on every Slashdotter's mind:

does the browser pass the Acid2 test?

I know where this is headed

[theCat]

Next month, an IM worm will install not just a browser, but an entire operating system. It will be Linux, but it will be setup to give the worm owner complete remote ops. It will have basic mail, IM , web browsing and word processing all via the usual open source tools, and will be made to look something like Windows. And 90% of the people who wake up to find this new OS running on their system will simply use it.

You KNOW they will. That's the level of what we're talking about.

For one thing people have become accustomed to random stuff showing up on updates and upgrades. The remore operatior will simply launch a splashscreen that says "A gift from Microsoft for your loyalty!" and people will go nuts. For another thing, there is a good deal of evidence accumulated over the many years of this malware war that the users who are keeping malware authors in business are total noobs. Many are developmentally disabled, or are children, or are computer phobes who avert their eyes when the machines "does something odd". Some are simply dumb as cabbages. They click "yeah sure, pwn me" on every dialog box because they are functioning as part of the attached peripherals a NOT an intelligent user.

No, I'm not bitter. I'm not being sarcastic. I've woken to the reality. This is our world, and we white hats are just a liitle slow on the uptake is all. What this suggests about computer ownership (like maybe you need an operator's license, as required with radio broadcasting, if you are going to traffic in the public sphere) is probably the next frontier of the discussion, that's all.

Re:I know where this is headed

[i_should_be_working]

It's funny 'cause it's true.

I'd like to do a social experiment and write a virus that pops up a window asking the question: "Install Virus?". The options are "No Thanks" and "yeah sure, pwn me". Now, I'm usually an optimist, but I think the results of this study would be depressing.

Re:I know where this is headed

[Simon Donkers]

I'd like to do a social experiment and write a virus that pops up a window asking the question: "Install Virus?". The options are "No Thanks" and "yeah sure, pwn me". Now, I'm usually an optimist, but I think the results of this study would be depressing.

You mean, welcome to MSN plus install, would you like us to bundle adware with this program to really annoy you?
[yes] [no]

Re:I know where this is headed

[ummit]

I'd like to do a social experiment and write a virus that pops up a window asking the question: "Install Virus?". The options are "No Thanks" and "yeah sure, pwn me".

That's a darn good idea. And, yes, some people would get pwned, and not necessarily because they're "stupid".

1. Assumed "Install Virus?" meant "Install Anti-virus software".
2. Accidentally hit RETURN instead of selecting "No thanks" button. (An easy mistake; anyone can make it.)

Perhaps the results of such an experiment would help to enlighten the gearheads-in-denial (you can spot 'em every time topics like this one come up) who think problems like these are all the user's fault, or that they're fixable with just a little education. Wrongola, on both counts.

Re:I know where this is headed

[Incadenza]

'Yes' and 'No' buttons are better avoided. 'Yes' and 'No' answers are only answered correctly when both the question and the answers are understood by the user. Which sounds totally silly, but believe me, we humans are totally silly (we are just in a state of denial about that). No to mention that the questions can be silly too.

It is lots better to have answers that have actions in them, like 'Install' and 'Skip', because people understand the implications of these even without understanding the questions. That is what Apple does with Mac OSX. And to be honest, I am kind of shocked that gnome and KDE did not pick this one up. To identify a problem with users brainlessly clicking 'Yes' without bothering to read the questions, and then to 'solve' this problem by switching the position of the buttons, is really bad GUI design. Come on guys, pick up a book on psychology, there's plenty of them around.

So if you want to test, test different GUI schemes. 'Install virus?' with 'Yes' and 'No' options, 'Install virus?' with 'No' and 'Yes' options, 'Install virus?' with 'Install' and 'Cancel' (or maybe 'Skip') options, or maybe even just two buttons, 'Install virus' and 'Keep system clean'. I'm sure neither of these will score 100%, but there sure will be relevant differences between the schemes.

It's just a joke and I'm not trolling

Yes, but I will use any excuse to postpone work.

Trusted Computing

[psp]

I know TC is not held in particularly high regard around here, but imagine this scenario:

1. An OS with a solid configurable TC implementation.
2. A knowledgeable computer user sets up the OS for the executablerunning IM user.
3. The OS is configured to only run applications from certain vendors (Mozilla, StarOffice, Microsoft?).

I would love to have TC for my sisters computer. She has never had the need to run any applications besides the ones I have installed.

Or is this already possible with any OS? The ability to specify a list of allowed executables and the disability for a user application to change the list.

Re:Trusted Computing

[LiquidCoooled]

Your point about 3 is moot.
All trusted applications will be runnable.

Think of the XBOX, only signed games can run, in this scenario, microsoft are the trust authority, if a piece of software remains unsigned then it cannot be run.

However, this only gives a false sense of security because all it takes to break this is somebody finding an exploit in a data file allowing unsigned code to be read and executed.

No TCP system will ever be able to handle signing every single data file although the RIAA/MPAA would like this.

Re:Trusted Computing

[bcmm]

They have some interesting locked-down Windows boxes at my sixth form. You can't write to the C drive (obviously), and you can't run executables from your own network folder, or from USB sticks, or in fact from anywhere you have write access to.
 
It infuriates me, but it wouldn't even be noticed by the sort of people who catch this "worm" (surely actually a virus, as the user is required to run it him/herself?).
I don't know how its done, but it seems to be at a fairly low level (doesn't just apply to starting things with Explorer but instead gives the same error even if you try to launch things from office macros, batch files, etc.). If something like this were built into windows (the machines at school have a lot of RM stuff in them, so I suspect it isn't a Windows feature), it would at least protect idiots that have bright friends and family to set stuff up for them. It's much simpler than TC, and the admin can log in (with a separate password you wouldn't even have to give your sister) and install things as normal, even if MS doesn't like it.

Re:Trusted Computing

[sqlrob]

Or is this already possible with any OS? The ability to specify a list of allowed executables and the disability for a user application to change the list.

I can think of at least two

Isn't gonna happen.

[Dorsai65]

When you try to make everything idiot-proof, you just raise the quality of the remaining idiots.

My quarter to two in the morning idea

[craznar]

Split the friggin' internet in half.

Give out odd numbered IP addresses to Linux users, and even numbered addresses to Windows Users.

Then Linux computers just turn off access from even numbered source addresses.

Problem solved.

Ok - time for bed.

Why Mac/Linux/etc. are no better than Windows

[Burdell]

As long as people will click "yes" to install/run some random bit of software, Mac/Linux/*BSD/etc. are not going to be any better than Windows. These aren't holes in the OS, they are holes in the user. Much of the malware (spam zombies, SSH password scanners, etc.) doesn't need any special privileges to run, so it could run as a normal user.

Something like SELinux may help, but then email/IRC messages can just come with instructions for the chcon command to run (people open encrypted ZIPs with the password in the body already; putting a command to "fix" a download is not that different).

The browser it installs is....

[madnuke]

Internet Explorer 7!

Simple safety options for IM:

[ettlz]

• Don't ever give received files execute permissions on UNIX and Windows systems with NTFS
• On Windows systems, rename .exe files to .exe.unsafe. Refuse to run such files and pop up a stern warning message. If they just rename it, well they get what they deserve.

Do the Safety Browse

[i_should_be_working]

We can browse if we want to,
we can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends dont browse and if they dont browse
Well theyre are no friends of mine

I say, we can browse where we want to,
catch a virus we will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this OS
Leave the real one far behind,

A lost cause

[hausmaus]

It's not the OS's fault, nor is it the IM program's fault. It's the fault of ignorant computer users, no matter what OS they use, doing stupid things that they know they shouldn't be doing, even when they're told constantly.

Thankfully, their ignorance means more money and work for me in my business to fix their problems that they brought on themselves.

If they're stupid enough to open something from a program that they know could be bad, then they do deserve whatever they get.

It used to be smart people using dumb computers - now it's dumb people using smart computers.

Disable automatic execution even with a dialog.

[argent]

In my 20 years of system administration I have often had people come to me and say "Peter, I just clicked the wrong button and my computer's acting funny." I've less often had people say "Peter, I downloaded a file to the desktop and opened it and my computer's acting funny." I've had several people say "Peter, I just clicked the wrong button AGAIN and I think I'm infected."

I've never had the same person come to me twice with "I've downloaded and opened a file and I'm infected." Give people even a small breathing space to think about what they're doing, without that reflex "gotta push a button" effect, and social social engineering is MUCH harder.

So...

You can solve this for most people simply by not including a mechanism for running untrusted content. Don't pop up a dialog box asking "What do you want to do with this application you just downloaded? (Open) (Show) (Ignore)". Don't even ask "The file you just asked to open is an appliaction? (Infect Me) (Cancel)". Just don't put the user in the position of deciding, right then, what to do with the file. Ever.

Firefox: get rid of the XPI install-from-web stuff. Let the user download the XPI and open it explicitly.

Apple: Dont' "open safe files after downloading"... there are no "safe files".

Microsoft: get rid of ActiveX and security zones and for god's sake don't try and make .NET-in-the-browser into the next Active Desktop disaster.

All of the above: If it's a file you've got a safe application for... a *safe application*, not a *safe file*... open it explicitly IN THAT APPLICATION. Don't go "this is a ZIP file so I'll open it in whatever random program the user has for opening archives". Keep a database of safe programs to use on untrusted content like you keep a database of plugins people have explicitly installed. This would resolve SO MANY security issues... damnit.

(don't treat archives as "safe files", but that's another rant)

(in fact there's a lot of ranting I could add here...)

Re:Linux installing worm

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're thinking of is something called "Tuxissa" which was
an April Fool's Joke around 1999 after "Melissa" had hit the
internet. The basic premise was to take
the Microsoft virus/worm attack of the day and piggyback
onto it kickstart or something like it.

The only problem at the time was the bandwidth requirements for
getting millions of basic Linux installs on all those Windows
boxes was prohibitive -- No one server could feed all those
client installs --- at least not in 1999.

However, now that we have Bittorrent and it's fairly robust,
Tuxissa now seems much more doable. In fact, it would be
the easiest way for a sysadmin who was tasked to convert
a local Microsoft network into a Linux network to go --
just pick the known exploit of the week and marry it up with
kickstart+bittorrent and seed server and away you go ---
boom! Instant Ubuntu/SuSe/Fedora/Debian/Slackware/whatever
local network.

--Johnny

Well...

[Wellington Grey]

what on Earth can we do so stop the spread of garbage like the above? To put it another way, will reducing the amount of potential "suckers" out there dissuade the bad guys from coming up with ever-more elaborate ideas such as this latest scam?

Clearly there isn't enough evolutionary pressure on the heard. What the good guys need to do is build computers that explode when the user does something stupid.

-Grey

Internet Noob "Final Solution"

[alohatiger]

Maybe some uberuser should make a "Click here for Brittney Spears Pics" trojan that wipes the computer. It could load a little program that runs at startup and nukes the PC from orbit.

Any other bots and spyware on that machine go away, and the user ends up with a clean factory restore (after his brother-in-law comes over to show him how to use the restore disks).

Over time, this could be modified to seek out zombie machines directly.

How is this an "IM" worm?

[layer3switch]

By reading the article, it seems it's just general user clicking on "OK" rather than "Save As" worm. How is it different if the delivery is done through email or popup or iframe on some website listed on Google or Yahoo or whatever cross link sites? Or AIM for that matter? How about Gaim? or How about Jabber?

Perhaps re-examining the actual exploit rather than delivery medium as the cause would be a good way to head toward right direction in my opinion.

Restricted User-space?

[ShyGuy91284]

UNIX/LINUX place a lot of restrictions on what can be modified by the user, and is part of where their good security comes from. Perhaps if children using AIM weren't logged in under the admin account or one with similar priviledges it would prevent the whole system from being hyjacked, and would just cause that account to need to be deleted. I don't know how much Windows limits user accounts, but if this isn't within the ability of Windows, it's quite sad.

A proposal I've proposed before.

[edunbar93]

How about making a new virus that, immediately after the user does something stupid enough to install it, turns the volume up to the max in windows, and starts looping a wav file that says "MORON ALERT!! W00PWOOPWOOP! MORON ALERT!!" and starts flashing their monitor red and blue, refusing any user input until they type "I have learned today that I should be more careful about the things I click on".

Oh yeah, and it sends itself to everyone in his address book, so that the shame can be shared among others.

Why does EVERYTHING transfer files?

[DaveLV]

Maybe we can't put the genie back into the bottle, but I think the real problem is that every Internet-enabled application these days is bastardized into a file transfer mechanism. IM programs should be for typing messages back and forth between two or more people. Why should IM even have the ability to transfer files?

Re:Why does EVERYTHING transfer files?

[m50d]

Because there is a perception that users should not be running servers. In particular, typical users are told "you need a firewall", which would block any webserver they actually managed to set up. KDE has a very nice system tray webserver, but how many distributions have iptables set up so it's inaccessible? Not to mention how many people are behind NAT these days.

Users need a way to transfer files to each other. What they should do is run an actual server for this, but they are told they should not, so every end user program gets a file transfer protocol tacked on - users can't be expected to say "yeah,get the file from http://my.ip.address:8080/foo", so they're given a way to transfer directly.

Re:Why does EVERYTHING transfer files?

[jb.hl.com]

Because it's a convenient feature and a perfect place to have it.

Bob: Did you get those sales figures?
Jim: No...

Bob sends file, job done.

make a friendly worm...

[AlgorithMan]

well - just make a "nice worm" that tells you

"hi, your computer is obviously insecure - may I install
[] firefox
[] thunderbird
[] AVG free (Antivirus)
[] hijackthis
[] and one of the following freeware firewalls: [insert firewalls here]
for you? - P.S. I'll install the software from official mirrors, no faked, phishing software - if I wanted to harm you, I could have done this already
[No] [Yes]

may I also interest you in
[] OpenOffice
[] miranda
[] bsplayer
[] ...
[No] [Yes]

May I recommend myself to your friends?
[No] [Yes]

thank you for your interest
I'll remove myself from your system now. goodbye!
[OK]

I think most people that stick with ms software do this because they have no clue how to install alternative software (seriously - my family uses PCs for 14 years now and still they call me and ask me how to install this and that software) so make a "worm" that assists you in making your pc more secure (and shows you that you need it at the same time) maybe put in links to small, easy-to-understand "getting started" sites...

Call me a glutton for punishment

[Mr Z]

Does anyone have a link to the really bad music this worm subjects its victims to? Hearing it would seriously enhance my sense of schadenfreude...

--Joe

Re:Call me a glutton for punishment

[Bambi Dee]

Try demoplanet.tv, the homepage shown in the article. That might just be it.

It's been done before

[reldruH]

That sounds a hell of a lot like the browser that gets installed with the new version of AIM. During install I tried telling it not to install the browser but it did anyway, was amazingly slow and had lots of pop ups. It sounds pretty similar to this worm.

Re:Too Bad...

[Jeremi]

I can't really feel sorry for these people. In my book, if you're dumb enough to run some strange executable, then you deserve what you get.

Maybe so, but the rest of us don't deserve what we get. Even if I'm a careful computer user and never get compromised, I still have to deal with the resulting spam, DDOS attacks, increased IT costs, etc, caused by people who do. Therefore it's in everybody's best interest to make security more idiot-proof -- we can't just say "to hell with the n00bs", because we still have to live on the same Internet as them.

The solution..

[Anonymous Coward]

The only solution to this problem is to kill all the people.

Unfortunately we can't do that yet, so the problem remains unsolveable.

Reflex Action

[shadypalm88]

Relabelling the "Yes" and "No" buttons to the actual result of clicking it (e.g. "Install this software") might combat the reflex action and force people to actually read the message instead of just jumping to the Yes button.

I have a solution!

[wolrahnaes]

Build computers with a robot arm that will reach out and smack the user in the back of the head every time they're about to run an EXE from a IM or popup.

A slightly lower-tech implementation has worked for me. When my friends ask me to fix their computer for the 30 billionth time after they infected it, I smack them in the back of the head and tell them not to be a moron, and then send them on to pay the Geek Squad to deal with their problems.

Where these people used to be reinfecting themselves on a weekly basis, they seem to have stopped now, so a combination of physical and wallet pain seems to be the best motivation to not be a retard.

Unfortunately that does nothing for the clueless

[Sycraft-fu]

Why? Because it becomes just another hoop to jump through. They don't consider the implications behind their action. The computer wants something, they give it what it wants to it'll shut up and let them get back to doing what they want to do.

Admin passwords are useful for knowledgable users because if you do something that shouldn't require admiin, but asks for it you can step back and think why it's asking, and approve or deny it based on more information. However clueless users won't do that, they won't know what should and shouldn't need it, so they'll just blanketly issue the admin password.

I've already witnessed this on other platforms (MacOS) that ask for admin. I was chatting with a guy while he was tinkering with his Mac, it popped up and asked for admin and he said "Huh, that shouldn't need admin"... as he was typing in his admin password (3 letters long). He even recognised that this might be a situation where it wasn't needed (it was actually, nothing harmful) but just gave it the password anyhow.

So while I think the privledge escalation is Vista is a nice try, and certianly something I'll use personally, I think it will ultimately make no difference for normal users. They'll just make it go away whenever it pops up, and they'll do that by giving it the password it wants.

How to remove the worm

[suv4x4]

A new IM worm discovered recently takes the novel step of installing its own web browser onto the victims PC... It's clear people cannot resist clicking "yes" to anything they're presented with via IM - with this in mind, what on Earth can we do so stop the spread of garbage like the above?

If you get infected, your IM might ask you if you want to get rid of a dangerous IM worm, just click yes and you'll be ok.
You also get very cheap C1ALi5, dunno what is it, but it seems like a great deal, so I ordered a bunch.