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Botnet Herders Attack MS06-040 Worm Hole
Laljeetji writes "eweek reports that the first wave of malicious attacks against the MS06-040 vulnerability is underway, using malware that hijacks unpatched Windows machines for use in IRC-controlled botnets. The attacks, which started late Aug. 12, use a variant of a backdoor Trojan that installs itself on a system, modifies security settings, connects to a remote IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and starts listening for commands from a remote hacker. On the MSRC blog, Microsoft is calling it a very small, targeted attack that does not (yet?) have an auto-spreading mechanism. LURHQ has a detailed analysis of the backdoor."
They know where its coming from, but the Chinese are still pissed at Jack Bauer so they won't shut it down.
actually, they say its the same server thats been running for months:
Amazingly, this new variant of Mocbot, still uses the same IRC server hostnames as a command-and-control mechanism after all these months. This may be partially due to the low-profile it has held, but also may be due to the fact that the hostnames and ip addresses associated with the command-and-control servers are almost all located in China. Historically Chinese ISPs and government entities have been less-than-cooperative in taking action against malware hosted and controlled from within their networks.
liqbase
Modern botnet command-and-control IRC servers don't give out information like who else is connected. In this Mocbot C&C, you join the channel, get an encrypted command (in the channel topic) which tells the bot to join another channel. In that channel, another encrypted command in the topic tells the bot to download and execute a trojan (which currently is detected by some AV as Trojan-Proxy.Win32.Ranky.fv).
The reason for all this subterfuge is, if the AV companies aren't spying on the control channel, they have no way to know about the second-stage infection, unless they get lucky - so even if they do clean the Mocbot infection, the proxy trojan still resides on the machine.
Yes, actually there is a remove command built in to Mocbot. However, you have to issue the command from the proper user@host mask; something you can't do unless you have admin access to the IRC server.
An alternative is to use DNS to redirect the bots to a blackhole IRC server where the remove command can be executed. Of course, this only works if you have control over the DNS (e.g. an ISP redirecting their own users). Getting someone responsible for the authoritative DNS server is not likely to happen given the Chinese origin.