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Two Worm "Families" Make Up Most Botnets
JMoon writes "HNS has an article about the Sdbot and Gaobot families which are responsible for most botnets worldwide. These two families were responsible for 80 percent of detections related to bots during the first quarter of 2007. Other culprits, although on a much lesser scale, included Oscarbot, IRCbot or RXbot."
viruses kinda runs in the family...
Recently, I had to put an SP1 WinXP online to demonstrate that it's (still) insecure to do that. I was expecting that the blaster menace has somewhat dwindled since its outbreak, simply 'cause it's been a while since its outbreak.
Boy, was I wrong!
It took 10 seconds for the FTP to go berserk, a minute later I was a happy member of the still strongly going family of wormspreaders.
People simply don't update their systems. It's amazing, that thing is afaik about 5 years old now, and still there are a LOT of machines existing that still blow the worm through the net.
We're not talking about an unfixable problem, or at least one where the user has to be dumb enough to open the can for the worm (ok, bad pun). It's as simple as updateing to SP2, something that works automatically.
You actually have to disable MS Messenger to at least cease to get those annoying popup messages, so why can people disable that but not update their systems? That's simply beyond my comprehension.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Q1 2007: 80% from two families.
2006: 74% from these families.
Hmm. Too bad bots reproduce asexually, otherwise we could hope for inbreeding to take them out.
Seriously, though, is the decreased diversity in bot "heritage" a good thing -- does it mean that bot infections are easier to detect and treat?
Or does it not make any bit of difference until the typical user learns to protect their PC?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Any information on non-Windows bots? I know bots are forever trying to get into SSH, so that must means non Windows machines are being targeted, but I am curious as to the success-rate.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If you are stuck with dialup, get a friend to download the SP2 CD and burn it for you.
If you have DSL or Cable and nothing else on your LAN is infected, your NAT or other firewall should protect you from "out of the box" threats. As long as you stick to known-safe web sites like windowsupdate and most security-software vendors, you should be OK long enough to get updated.
What's that? You are on DSL or Cable and do NOT have a firewall? Spend a few bucks and get one!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
SDBot is incredibly popular because it's open source and easily modified to sneak past most AV software with minor changes. It also has an extremely wide array of features, and tends to be very reliable.
People without the knowledge to code their own trojan/bot from scratch will naturally gravitate towards tools which allow them to make their money more easily, and it's a real time saver.
Or so I hear.
I'm not sure if botnets have "signature" activity that's easy for an ISP to spot or not.
If they do, then getting ISPs to proactively monitor their customers for botnet-specific activities and phone them when they see suspicious activity will go a long way toward eliminating these particular threats.
Imagine if your mother getting this answering-machine message from her DSL provider:
"Hello Ms. Jones. You've heard of computer viruses? Our engineers are seeing signs of a virus on one of your computers. Please visit our security web site at http://www.momsisp.com./ This same web site is printed on your billing statement. In the meantime, we are taking steps to keep the virus from spreading. This may affect your connection. We will remove these blocks automatically when we see your system is clean. If you have any questions, call us at 1-800-MOM-SISP. Thank you."
Her next call will probably be to you. Problem solved.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you write a piece of code that's going to spread through unpatched computer networks you're creating a worm. Not only that, but if you make a mistake and this piece of code somehow (unforeseeably) damages any thing you will be in a world of hurt.
Either way, the law doesn't look to kindly on computer trespass even if (you *claim*) your intentions are good.
Quack, quack.
A large fraction of the problem can be taken care of by using a hardware firewall in front of your PC from the moment you first plug it in, which'll usually keep you safe long enough to get the current security upgrades. That's not fool-proof - there are bad guys hunting for flaws in popular firewall boxes - but it's a good start.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Though he did not get jail time, he still was convicted. http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/morris-w orm.html
Fight Spammers!
Thought this would be an interesting point to add about botnets and security.
....
2 years ago I almost gave our security people a heart attack when I suggested an internal botnet.
We have most of our servers plugged into a tightly controlled IRC server.
All servers run a custom bot with limited access that pipe all critical files into specific IRC channels.
Response bots monitor the channels and take appropriate action, signaling the bots to run specific commands, paging, emailing, etc.
It allows NOC to run things like 'uptime' and have dozens of servers reply at once.
Security it tightly controlled at the bot and server level, using a custom hacked and very locked down UnlreaIRCd.
For our security at least, it was the first example of a useful IRC setup that allowed easy monitoring and limited control of servers.
As bad as botnets are, they are very good at what they do.
Good example of allowing totally unrelated applications to communicate with each other, as basically all programming languages have IRC support.
And a funny side note, my slashdot "verification image" is "misuse"
I have a few comments and one will answer some of the previous questions to some degree.
.scan 10.0.0.0/8 then there's a pretty good chance the machine in question is an infected bot and most likely with one of the aforementioned variants. Now most home users won't have insight into this type of activity. And funny enough there's not much "big brother" by way of ISPs caring much for this. Unless reported to them they most likely won't do anything. Even then they still might not do anything. http://www.shadowserver.org/ keeps a list of good/responsive ISPs. This might be more in the case of a malicious host housing an IRCD, but that's beside the point.
First, the majority of these trojans, specifically these are all IRC based. They are very easy to spot, especially in corporate environments. Why? Well because most people do not use IRC while they are at work. Not to mention many companies will have policies against it. This makes intrusion detection for these kinds of bots very easily. Since most of these servers housing the bots are just standard Unreal IRCD (generally hacker-installed) or whatever IRCD undernet/efnet/etc. run on, they are not encrypted. This means when a machine connects, traffic with "NOTICE", "PRIVMSG", "JOIN #" etc is all sent in the clear. There have been snort/bleeding snort rules to look for this type of activity for years and they haven't had to change much. Sure the ports might not always be 6667-6669/7000, but looking for activity like this on a certain port is dumb to do anyway.
A simple analysis of most IRC traffic should you have real-time peaks or capture logs will tell you pretty quick if it's malicious. If you see a nick change to XP|24249429 or USA|2942949 and it joins a channel called #owned with a topic of
Now finally these two are quite popular. Why? Well it has been said already. The source for them is our there and they are readily available. People frequently update and modify them to avoid AV detection. Hell, many people don't update and modify them. So many people are running without [updated] AV that it doesn't seem to matter much. If you notice how most people get infected, it's the same old thing. IM worm, e-mail worm, malicious website, or a scan for the 2 year old dcom exploit. Every time some new IE/Firefox/etc vulnerability is released, someone quickly makes it download their trojan.
These variants have been around for years. Luckily the people using them are pretty dumb. It's just a matter of time before worms/viruses/etc turn to web-based (not IRC) and encryption as the norm.
No ISP is going to shut off an account because of an infected computer. They might throttle it somewhat, but it is the site administrator's responsibility to deal with infected computers. What? Your parents don't have a "site administrator" overseeing their computers? (((except when you are there... ha ha))) Well, that sounds like a real problem, doesn't it?
What we have are general-purpose computers that people install random software on without thinking about where it came from, what it might do and the consequences of having that happen. Then, they don't check to see what their computer is doing when it is supposedly idle and thrashing around on the hard drive or is really slow. Well, maybe it is just getting old and needs to be replaced. Right.
So we have the equivalent of handing a loaded revolver to a three-year-old and leaving the room. We have seen how they can hurt themselves with it. We can see how they hurt others with it. And about all that is done is giving them some more bullets.
Let's be clear about one thing here. Windows "security" or the lack of it is not the problem. If the machine is locked down utterly so that nothing can be installed, removed or modified Windows security is perfectly adequate. Unfortunately, nobody seems to want to run their computer this way. There is no security if the "user" can simply install any old thing they want, be it some new flash player with a bug in it, WeatherBug or a bot trojan. Signing code is not the answer - people aren't reading the messages that are displayed. You could have a page of text displayed when a trojan is installed that says in eight different ways "this will take over your computer and make it ours" and people would install it.
The answer is pretty clear. General purpose computers that can have software installed are a tool that must be monitored, controlled and administered. Giving one to a user and leaving them alone with it is a reciepe for disaster. Just like the disaster with spam, botnets and viruses we are seeing right now.
Would a botnet by any other name smell just as sour?
Probably not.
If you'd called it a distributed asset-monitoring and -control system and given it a fancy acronym like DAMACS or something, it would've been a better sell.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you use the logic "-us" => "-i", then we should have "virus" => "viri". Where the heck do people get the extra i?
Math-oriented people must be familiar with "radius" => "radii", but it does follow the same logic with the extra i already there in the singular form. Then again, "virii" is funny in the way that it emphasizes incorrect spelling. It's even more funny when used by someone pretending to work with computers where typos are much more dangerous than in natural languages.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I thought they were Symantec and AVG.
Oh, you mean *PUBLICLY* acknowledged virus writers?
If I were posting seriously, I would have.
You get a lot of blank stares in casual conversation, don't you?
I run in to two groups that make up the majority of "not updated" systems:
1) People who won't do any manual steps at all to update. Every so often, Windows has an update that needs you to interact with it. Rather than autoinstalling it'll just put the little "You've got updates" icon in your sys tray and pop up a bubble about it from time to time. However some people just refuse to deal with that. A couple clicks is more than they are willing to do. Totally automated is ok, but they can't be bothered to do anything more.
2) However an even larger number don't want their system to reboot. Tons of those at work. They have something or other running continuously that they can't be bothered to save the state on. So they turn off the updates so that it won't reboot. Yes, really.
That accounts for at least 90% of the no-update people I run across. There's a small percentage that won't do it because they read on some forum that some guy had a problem with an update and they are convinced Microsoft will break their system, but most are just lazy as hell.
There is a classic case of this that happened IIRC at MIT on one of the early networks. Some bright person wrote a small worm that went around and performed regular updates to the systems. All went well for a few months or so, but then a previously unknown bug in the worm caused it to go nuts and brought the network down HARD. In a similar vein, as an example of how things can go wrong, there's a famous story of someone (seem to remember him being connected with NSA or CIA or one of them... son of the director?) who wrote a worm that didn't have a payload in it to see if he could do it. It was supposed to send a couple copies of itself out, propogate for a bit, then erase itself. A bug in the logic however made it bombard the network attempting to propogate which resulted in one of the first DDOS attacks, even if un-intentional.
The reason in short of why you don't see any white hat mal-ware is because the risk is just too great that something can go wrong. It's better to come up with a more robust solution to the problem, rather than introducing another element into the mix that is already on shaky ground to begin with.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Are you trying to say he/she works at Radio Shack?
Oh wait, that'd be giving blank stares.... nevermind.
Karnal
Those SSH password attacks spread Linux based Spambots. I have repaired a handful of servers in the USA and Singapore that suffered infections. The Redone spambot targets the tens of thousands of indentical systems on server farms, of which some are sure to have bad passwords. Once it has set up shop it spewes out enormous amounts of spam. It is managed through IRC.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Port monitoring.
Unusual activity on non-standard ports. Atleast thats how I discovered it at my last job. Open up a packet sniffer, let it pull in traffic for a little while, then investigate.
Smarter worms use standard ports, but then you tell but unusual traffic patterns. (ie, why does "Bob the idiots" computer keep sending 2k of data to pron-iz-gud.com 50 times a minute??)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I think you are referring to this
do not click above link unless you want your browser hijacked - very nasty!