Slashdot Mirror
Massive Spam Shot of "Storm Trojan"
jcatcw writes "Postini has already counted nearly 5 million copies of the spam in the last 24 hours, and calculated that the run currently accounts for 87% of all malware being spread through email. 'Expect this to grow much larger,' a Postini spokesman said; 'It should top out at 60 million messages within the next 24 hours.' It's the largest attack in the last 12 months, and more than three times the volume of the two biggest in recent memory: a pair of blasts in December and January. The spam carries a ZIP file attachment posing as a patch with subjects such as Worm Alert!, Worm Detected, Spyware Detected!, or Virus Activity Detected."
Oh, come on. I am FAAAR from a MS apologist, but this trojan is not really something that they can (or should) prevent! This worm is not exploiting any flaw in MS's programs that I am aware of, it is simply social engineering. Unless you make Windows prevent a user from running arbitrary code, I don't know how you'd fix this.
If anyone should be sued, it should be the ISPs who allow zombies to sit there on their network. I don't like lawsuits, and would prefer to see some government incentive used to compel ISPs to remove the zombies.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
By that logic, should Slashdot be sued by sites that suffer the Slashdot Effect? It is a form of DoS, after all, and Slashdot are obviously aware when it occurs yet do little (mirrors after the fact) or nothing (no mirror at all) to prevent it.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
All the more reason to get grandma off windows and onto at least a Mac, if not Linux.
Out of curiosity... since this is a completely social hack, and is just a means to trick somebody into opening up a compressed file and running the included executable... why would a Mac or Linux user be immune? Cannot Mac and Linux users also run executable programs from their desktops? You're confusing the ability to run a program of your choice with the means by which someone is fooling you into thinking you should choose to run it, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Er.. apart from the fact that this is a major security problem and Vista is advertised as "much more secure" and that it's also supposed to have multiple privilage levels for the same user and this would be exactly the kind of problem which would be stopped by executing programs from email with lower privilages and that a user level trojan would be an ideal case for blocking with an O/S level built in firewall and that if the anti-virus people were able to do low level things on Vista, it would probably also be more easy for them to block this kind of thing at the point where you try to do file access and so many other things that I would probably run out of breath and die trying to write this without using any commas or full stops;
No; this has nothing to do with Vista.
Agreed. You can not make a system to prevent users from shooting themselves in the fool. I mean I can drive my car into a tree, how dare it let me do that!
Sure, you could write a trojan targeted toward those OSs. And you could presumably trick users w/o regard to the OS they use. But it's far more likely that the windows user is logged in with full Admin privileges. The Linux and Max users are probably not, limiting the extent that the trojan can mess with their systems. You probably could trick the Mac and Linux users to log in as admin, to change the file mode to executable, and run the trojan. However, at each step, the user might just wise up and have second thoughts. Wouldn't stop all cases, but with something like this, it doesn't hurt to improve the odds in the good guys' favor.
I am not a crackpot.
Wrong - Linux and Mac are completely vulnerable to this type of attack. You go to install something that you were told to do so and it prompts for the root password. The user then types it in and the machine is wide open.
Don't think that would happen? You must be dealing with a better class of users than exist in the wild. Of course it would happen, and happen at such a frequency that it would be just another massive exploit.
Windows is targeted because of market penetration. Why bother with less than 5% when you can get 95% in a single effort?
A BOFH at my company decided that the email server would not accept any M$ executable file attachments (.exe, .src, .zip, etc) four years ago. Yes, yes that was me. Our ClamAV spends most of it's day dumping fishing emails.
And you know what kind of "DRM" flames show up on Slashdot if you even suggest people not be able to run arbitrary code. We all know social engineering attacks are possible on all platforms that allow users to run code that they want to. I'm agreeing with you here - this is NOT a Windows problem (other than Windows being popular enough that people write these things for it). In cases where it is a Windows flaw - sure, that's MS fault. But here it looks like people are flaming them just for their success.
Actually, there is a technical flaw, not just a human engineering one. The system allows users to install software, with global system implications, with no confirmation. My Mac confirms such things with me, and seems to get it right. My Linux box won't let me touch the global system configuration at all unless I su to root.
This has always been the problem. I recognize that there is incompetent Windows software out there that won't run without Administrator privileges, but that's another issue. If you really need privilege to do something (like change your password), others systems have ways of temporarily elevating privilege. Like suid on Unix.
...laura
s/g//
:n
And you could presumably trick users w/o regard to the OS they use. But it's far more likely that the windows user is logged in with full Admin privileges.
But it doesn't matter.
The trojan/worm need not be an administrator to trash a user's computer, even with Linux. Let's use Ubuntu as an example. It can still send mail and propagate just fine as a regular user. It can also trash that user's documents and files (which are likely to be the only important data on the machine). It can use a crontab entry to start a daemon on a high-numbered port, which will run without user interaction, or without them even being logged in. That daemon won't be root, but it will still be capable of being a very proficient zombie.
After that, for good measure, it can just run gksudo and simply ask the user for root permission. Ubuntu users are absolutely content to enter their own password into gksudo whenever prompted, especially when performing updates and patches (as this claims to be). So, the trojan will readily then gain root and be free to run completely amock. Trashing or rooting the OS is the obvious next step, but it's probably not even needed after all of the damage and infiltration already accomplished as a regular user.
Seriously - just because it's not Windows does not mean that it's secure. As long as people are able to run arbitrary programs on their own computers, these types of things will continue to be a problem...no matter what kind of computer it is, and no matter if it has root/administrator priveledges or not.
Kid-proof tablet..
Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925330/en-us
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/
Rumor has it that Postini is close to filing their S1 (i.e., getting ready to go public). Coincidence? Hmmm....
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey