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Spam-Bot Intrusion Caught — Now What?

Posted by Cliff on from the searching-for-peace-keepers-on-the-internet dept.

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? "

13 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. one word by Jbcarpen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Spamhaus.

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    GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
  2. Places to report to... by caitriona81 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Places to report to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Attacking botrunners directly, or vigilante action doesn't help

      The spirited attack on and destruction of Blue Security and the spam flood that followed, does not support that assertion. Somebody wanted them gone badly, for a reason.

    2. Re:Places to report to... by caitriona81 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I should probably rephrase and clarify, attacking them directly without legal action to back that up is bad - ie, if you are going after a bot runner, it needs to be in a manner that not only takes away their toys, but also puts them in jail, for a long period of time. If you can't take away their freedom in the process, then you aren't doing us any favors by teaching them how not to get caught -- botnets, and their means of control get more and more sophisticated, with overall trends towards plausible deniability and robust survivable command and control networks, designed to either resist attack, or be reconfigured after the fact to retain control of compromised hosts.

      This is a far cry from when botnets were controlled "in the open" on public IRC networks - the kiddies are clearly learning something with each iteration, and they are sharing that knowledge amongst themselves. Also of note is more use of packers, executable encryption and anti-debugger routines, which were completely absent from early botnet executables. Use of rootkits, as well as secondary backdoors (to regain access after the system owner detects the intrusion) are also on the rise.

    3. Re:Places to report to... by tacocat · · Score: 4, Funny

      I disagree. If you could determine the physical location of such bot herders and disclose that to the internet at large, I'm sure that there would be a final solution applied that people would be willing to turn their backs on. Especially if you could post photographs, names, and physical addresses.

  3. You could always try private sector... by BinarySkies · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is an organization, ShadowServer (www.shadowserver.org if I recall right) that specializes in mucking about with Botnets. They'd probably have the right contacts and such to deal with that.

  4. What actions? by dbIII · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  5. Name and shame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How did you get the infestation? What did you download?

  6. contact the ISP/registrar by sp1n · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You have the bot herder address. To do the most "damage", get it shut down. Contact the ISP abuse department who hosts it. If there's a DNS name, also contact the ISP hosting the authoritative DNS zone and possibly the registrar, who may elect to terminate the domain. If you don't get a response from the ISP, contact their upstream provider(s) (if a smaller Tier 3 ISP).

    Whois is your friend.

    1. Re:contact the ISP/registrar by bernywork · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
  7. Use your government by tigersha · · Score: 5, Funny

    Easy.

    Hack into the US Navy weapons control website.

    Search for a file called "city-coords.txt".

    Find out what the lat and long is of the spammer.

    Change the line "Al Queda Base 4:xxx" to reflect the new coordinates.

    Dress as Osama and make a press release with a big "Base 4" sign behind you. Use a good make-up artist if you want.

    Two days leater and BAM!!! the spammer is gone. Your tax dollars at work for you!

    --
    The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
  8. Was in similar situation by mattr · · Score: 3, Informative

    I had my own server broken into for the first time, wasn't a botnet but a bank of america style phishing site. I discovered it when trying to make a subdomain with the control panel didn't work right.. the provider said they cleaned some out but couldn't be sure and then in fact I found the servers myself, in /root and /tmp disguised as other files. I mailed yahoo and google since both had email addresses being used, and told the isp. Guess what? I got no response from google, and none from the isp (they totally suck too, I've been down for a month after being told to erase the disk and they upgraded me - to Fedora Core 2! - and are so incompetent it is not even usable anymore. So I'm changing to a better managed hosting company rsn.)
    I did get a thank you from Yahoo. But, the first one was clueless, ignoring the content of my letter. I got a second one from them saying thanks. But that they couldn't accept attachments. So couldn't send them the proof.

    At any rate, what I did is erase the disk, restore from backup and some checked files, and lose a lot of time. There is probably little more you can do than simply report to one of the links below that you have a botnet address then as quickly as possible erase it.

    I also found a number of commands changed in /bin however I couldn't tell if it was the crackers or the isp who did that. It was running out of date software, and though they failed lots of ftp login probes it looks like they got in through an out of use user's login somehow and promoted to root.

    Moral of the story? If you use a managed hosting service, keep a FULL backup locally. Run tripwire or something similar, I will from now on. Use a hosting service that is not completely clueless. Do not try an upgrade or anything afterwards. Have a portable hard disk you can use - my ipod was very useful. The most annoying thing was having to spend lots of time on the phone with admins, and having my email and website hanging in the air. The answer is to immediately cut all your losses, get another system maybe on another provider. Possibly you could even do this with a local machine and dyndns temporarily but if you're busy the last thing you have time to do is mess with crooks. Best thing that came from it is I discovered several other hosting companies from friendly clients who helped me get my jobs done.

    1. Re:Was in similar situation by bleh-of-the-huns · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yahoo and google etc are not clueless, just over worked. I have worked security for large ISPs, UUNET (prior to MCI getting involved), AOL Time Warner, and a couple of others. They get far too many complaints to be able to respond to each, so you are lucky if you get an autoresponce, but don't expect them to contact you, there is just no time for it. The attachment problem is due to the fact that in many cases, complaints are placed into a tracking system, so instead of an attachment, you end up with uuencoded text, its a pain to have to reassemble that manually for every complaint, and if you hit up the security pages of those websites, they clearly state not to use attachments.

      Unless the botnet has caused more then $5k in proven damages, with tangible evidence, law enforcement will not get involved, this is at the federal level, not sure about state and local, as they rarely deal with cyber crimes of this type, they prefer to deal with cyber stalking and threats to individuals in their localities. If you must report a botnet, report it to USCERT (run by DHS), they may not be able to get to the root if its in one of those countries listed, but they can research it, and they are capable, and if something can be done, it will be done in the background.

      --
      I came, I conquered, I coredumped