Spam-Bot Intrusion Caught — Now What?

An anonymous reader wonders: "I've recently detected and halted an intrusion on my home computer, taken some actions to prevent further intrusions, and located the software that was running a bot agent. Cursory examination showed that the bot software is intended for acting as an agent for spamming. Configuration files distinctly point at the user/host/domain of several bot-herders — damning evidence. Nothing would please me more than to see this botnet to be caught and disassembled, I'm sure much of the internet-using community would support this. Thanks in advance for your suggestions. So, to whom should I disclose this information for appropriate investigation, follow up, and countermeasures? "

Comments

Places to report to...

[caitriona81]

1) Don't contribute to the problem. Attacking botrunners directly, or vigilante action doesn't help, and may actually be harmful - by teaching them how to build better drones. See http://fm.vix.com/internet/security/superbugs.html

2) As for US gov't agencies, if you or the attacker seem to be in the US, http://www.ic3.gov/ is likely to be interested. http://www.cert.org/csirts/national/contact.html can also put you in touch with nationial computer security incident response teams, who will also be interested (you only need to contact the one local to you, please don't shotgun complaints to all of them.)

3) As for private companies and research organizations, if the bot isn't already clearly and specifically detected by antivirus, report it to them, following their reporting guidelines. Shadowserver (http://www.shadowserver.org) seems to be interested in researching and gathering intelligence on botnets also.

What actions?

[dbIII]

Were the actions to install from scratch on a new disk / take a disk image to look at later + reformat + reinstall / poke around for a bit with the thing not on the network before reformat + reinstall / rely on external sources for info and just wipe the thing / or did you take the common and lazy approach now of just fixing the obvious damage and hoping the rest of the system is not compromised? The real pain is you can't even trust the backups in some cases especially if the people responsible for the machine ignore it most of the time - it may have been rooted for a while.

Preaching to the converted here but I'm amazed how many people do not realise that an owned computer is exactly that - there is nothing at all you can trust absolutely so you have to look at what is on the disk with something else and have to wipe it and start again. On *nix script kiddies love to put things in unexpected spots in the init scripts like in /etc/init.d/functions or the equivalent, or replace things like ntpd that you expect to talk to the outside world - so they would have control well before you get a shell. Some linux rootkits changed the generally useless ext2/ext3 file attributes in a cute effort to make cleaning up harder for those prone to try - it made it trivial to find their stuff becuase it would be the only thing on the volume with attributes set. Even then you can't trust that is all they did - it's just an obvious sign that you cannot trust anything on the machine.

Re:contact the ISP/registrar

[bernywork]

Fantastic. Get the persons account shut down, like most people these days, who have multiple domains, internet links and everything else, he will be offline for what? A couple of hours? Your just going to piss him / her off.

No, the best thing to do here is kill the whole problem. All the machines in the botnet need to be cleaned and updated so that they don't get re-infected, otherwise they will get taken over by someone else (Yes, I know most people when they infect a system DO update it so that someone else can't take over, but they leave back doors). The person running the botnet needs to see the beak (Judge). It might be that the beak decides that a slap on the wrist is the appropriate action, but I think just cutting off one point of access / control of a bot net which I am sure that they have other control over is just silly.