Exposing Bots In Big Companies

CalicoPenny let us know about yet another "30 days" effort, this one to name the names of major companies infected with spam-spewing bots. Support Intelligence began the effort on March 28, out of frustration at not being able to attract the attention of anyone who could fix the problems at these companies. While they haven't named 30 companies over the ensuing month, they did name some prominent ones, such as Thompson Financial, Bank of America, and AIG. The scary part is that if a bot can spam it can capture keystrokes or troll for interesting documents.

Comments

Not surprising...

[Penguinisto]

Big company == shedloads of workstations with shedloads of not-too-intelligent computer users.

Aside from IT efforts to clean up (or at least keep their heads above water), the percentages would likely compare favorably with the home user population at large, methinks. Sometimes (like ferinstance the company I work for) can be outright anal about security (custom images, email that's filtered nine ways from Sunday, etc), and yet about once a month scans will pop up someone who has been bit with the latest variant of (insert malware here). To their credit, the guys here remove it often within minutes of detection- never seen one last more than a couple of hours. (not just saying that because I happen to be a sysadmin there, seriously... the user-end guys are anal about that sort of thing, and if they weren't the network guys would happily shut off the offending port @ the switch to get the user's attention).

/P

Send in the lawyers

[secolactico]

How long before some company tries to cover up the embarrassment by suing the people who disclose the fact that they have machines infected with bots? They might not succeed, but they might make life unpleasant for a short while for those who post the info.

Shouldn't be too hard?

[hklingon]

It scares me just how prevalent this type of software is.. not just the spam bots but the malware and other stuff meant to steal data. Locating+shutting down spambots is the easiest task. I'm pretty small time but I found something interesting once while working with a new client to get them fixed up with antivirus and internet monitoring software (squid+sarg). I'd locked down some things and I kept noticing one PC trying to connect to yahoo every week at about 2:00 am. Long story short it was apparently attempting to email a 500kb attachment... that was apparently a log of everything typed in the week before and some other stuff. That *almost* went unnoticed. That type of infection is downright scary.... who is going to notice a 500kb email going out through an https connection at yahoo? It didn't even seem to be part of a command+control network... just gathering info??

The spambot infections is just the most visible symptom of a larger problem... they're talking about some "big name" companies apparently, but it is the smaller and medium sized businesses that really make the world tick... it is simply too complex, challenging and costly to really secure windows boxes without severely compromising functionality. It is also apparently not something that lends itself well to automation... I see big companies using enterprise software to "lock down" workstations and "reset" workstation images as their solution but there isn't really a small business answer here that I know of. If the tools were better/easier to use it might be easier to keep an eye on one's "flock" but it is a horrible pain both in setup and upkeep to really anticipate what might be happening. The entire stack one could use in windows to manage this stuff, from Event Logging to vb scripting automation, and all the way up to group policy is half-assed at best. This is the type of result you can expect.

this type of story is why I think that learning and/or heuristic scanners (both at the machine and router/firewall/proxy level) are pretty much the only way we can win. I'm not imagining something sentient, mind you, just something that will sift through all the event logs and point me toward things actually worth my attention instead of "every little thing".

exposing == alienating potential clients?

[Gary W. Longsine]

My company, Intrinsic Security generates as an artifact of product testing a certain amount of data about botnet and worm infestations on company and government networks. I have always tought that these kinds of public exposures would scare off clients, not only the companies named, but many other companies that would lose respect for a security company publically shaming potential clients. I definitely understand the frustation mentioned in the summary, as many people in IT consider themselves to be malware experts and they always think they have "solved" the "problem" by applying the latest antivirus definitions or tweaking their IDS rules. Most IT managers don't seem to really quite understand that the typical malware today is a radically different threat than they were five years ago. Keystroke logging is routine now, a drop-in module for malware authors.

Am I wrong? Should I publish the list of companies that I know had bots on their networks in March?

• 174 private corporations and government agencies
• 48 schools & universities
• 118 telecom companies (these are partly home DSL / cable modem circuits, partly private companies where the ARIN records are not delegated but rather managed by the ISP)