Storm Worm Evolves To Use Tor

An anonymous reader writes "Seems like the Storm botnet that was behind the last two waves of attacks is also responsible for this new kind of social-engineering based attacks, using spam to try and convince users of the necessity of using Tor for there communications. They 'kindly' provide a link to download a trojaned version of Tor. This blog entry has a link to the original post on or-talk mailing list which has some samples of the messages."

Comments

Are we late to the party?

[Jennifer York]

I'm surprised that it took this long for them to try to hide their tracks through anonymizers. Perhaps they've been doing this for quite sometime, and just now are we catching on to the technique...

It just makes sense, and is obvious, and a natural progression of the technology..... Hey! Maybe I should write a patent!

Re:Are we late to the party?

[VGPowerlord]

I'm still not sure why people would actually listen to that. I mean... why would anyone just download a random program from a website without looking up said program in, say, google to see what it actually does?

Re:Are we late to the party?

[Urd.Yggdrasil]

They aren't using Tor to hide their traffic, their trying to trick users into download a Trojan saying that it is a Tor executable and they need to protect their privacy. The Storm bot net uses a system called Fast Flux to hide traffic.

Re:Are we late to the party?

[rucs_hack]

if you look at sites like gamecopyworld.com you will find a wealth of programs that people will download for legitimate (in the consumers mind) use, to mean they can keep their game dvds in their boxes. Add 'trainers' and 'fun free games' to the list and your looking at the majority of casual downloads not directly involving pron or media.

The main problem though is closed source. If source is closed, then there is no easy way to find malicious code before it is deployed on your system. Ok, I'm speaking as a programmer, so that would be useful for me, not a non coder. Still, the point remains, binary distribution only means trouble, be it storm, a sony rootkit, or just 'phone home' code in a program.

What we need is something sort of like gentoo, where all programs are compiled locally, and the code can be inspected for malicious intent. Alas such technology, while it does exist, does not exist in a form that could be disseminated and used by people with no technological background. This is a pipe dream for the moment, I know this. Especially since I tried once to compile openoffice locally (18 hours I think). Perhaps trusted compile farms that deliver fresh binaries?

Waxing lyrical I know, but there has to be an answer somewhere.

Re:Are we late to the party?

[plover]

Because the modestly intelligent person you are hoping for might think, "This says to install tor, let me open a new window and google for it. Hey, this tor thing looks pretty good!" It's the sort of reaction we encourage people to have, to do some research before installing.

Of course, they then follow the original link from the worm and they still get the trojan. So close, and yet so far... sigh.

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[account_deleted]

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Storm is still a trojan, not a worm

[A beautiful mind]

As always, it works based on user stupidity, not programmer stupidity.

Re:Storm is still a trojan, not a worm

[Spy der Mann]

As always, it works based on user stupidity

Oh no, the internet's doomed! :(

Spelling...

[rumith]

using spam to try and convince users of the necessity of using Tor for there communications. It took me a second to understand what the author meant. Spell-checking, anyone?

Speaking on topic, I'd like to correct one of the previous posters: it's not a mere variation on the "Use XXX Bank" theme; as far as I understand, Tor has been picked among tons of other software that could be infected and supplied to users because it helps the spammers in covering their tracks, since their email is routed through Tor now.

Who is behind the Storm Botnet?

[kryptkpr]

There is an excellent article in Wired from several weeks ago from when Storm was used to DDoS the entire country of Estonia for 2 weeks. A fantastic read, but here's a particularly scary excerpt: Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe

If that is the case -- if Azizov isn't trying to cloud the issue -- the implication is perhaps more troubling. It suggests that there is a group of Russian hackers who, on their own, can disrupt the routine functioning of commerce, media, and government any time they want. If so, these hackers represent a stateless power -- a sort of private militia.

While the article does contain a lot of speculation and sketchy sources (like the above quoted Azizov) the evidence does seem to be pointing in a particular direction:

I ask him why anyone would trust him. After all, he seems to have a suspiciously intimate knowledge of the Estonian attacks. "Russian IT specialists are knowledgeable and experienced enough to destroy the key servers of whole states," he says. "They're the best in the world."

The implication: Clearly you want them on your side, so why not hire them? Maybe Estonia was simply an advertising campaign.

It's starting to look an awful lot like another Cold War is coming, except this time it will be a Cyber war waged by turning your enemy's (and the rest of the world's) poorly secured computers against their critical infrastructure while the actual government absolves itself of blame. Nice.

Re:Ummm.

[Colin Smith]

Seems a lot more advanced than most of the usual spam/bot/virus stuff I read about. You mean... More intelligently designed?

Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if people would do crazy shit like that then we'd have botnets consisting of billions of computers... oh wait.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Who are the stormbot people?

[Urd.Yggdrasil]

The group running the system is taking precautions to avoid detection, such as using Fast Flux Also it is speculated that they are in a former Soviet block country, which tend to have very poor laws and few resources to go after such people.

Re:Who are the stormbot people?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, somewhere, there ought to be a way of tracking the stormbot people back to its originators. Theoretically "yes". But in practice the answer is "no".

The people running this botnet can choose from millions of computers they want to use as anonymous bouncers/routers. And they can tripwire their nodes so that after 30 minutes of use as a bouncer, the hard disks are overwritten with 0's (although in most cases this isn't required as IP addresses wouldn't be stored anyway).

A chain of 20 hacked computers spanning the globe operating as routers is not easy to trace. You have to talk to each owner in the chain one-by-one and catch the bounced connection in realtime to reveal the IP for the next node in the chain. And the attackers can obfuscate their presence by programming their bots to simulate these proxy connections at random. Imagine having to trace through 100,000 chains, each containing 20-30 routing nodes. These chains are completely dynamic and randomly change every half an hour.

The Storm botnet is almost the "perfect hack" unless the perpetrators make some big mistakes. If the owners of this botnet installed Freenet on all the bots, we'd have an unenforceable darknet which can only be blocked (maybe! - if you're really lucky) at the ISP. Anyone could tap into this new darknet and do as much internet crime as they like without ever having to worry about getting caught.

Misleading headline

[yuna49]

The Storm worm isn't using Tor.

The spam email in question tells the reader that, if they are running torrents, they should use this Tor thing to cover their tracks. The link points to the trojan. The file in question is about 150K in size, or about 20x smaller than the Windows version of Tor (2-3 MB) on the actual site.

I posted a warning about this very email on a well-known anime site since I suspected some people there might download it in response to the e-mail.

There's also a version that poses as a YouTube video.

Most of these emails have URLs that use IP addresses, not domain names. Between my SpamAssassin rules and Mozilla Thunderbird's built-in anti-malware protections, messages like these are either quarantined or tagged as dangerous. I've not seen an legitimate email from any correspondent that uses URLs with IP addresses in the host part.

I opened the YouTube version in a Windows VM that had Kaspersky installed. It identified an attempted replacement of tcpip.sys and told me it should be quarantined. Unfortunately a ClamAV scan of the file did not detect anything suspicious.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:When your users are illiterate ...

[DrSkwid]

are you su're ?

My question is..

[XenophileJKO]

If the command and control and updating is done via peer to peer instead of a centralized server, why has nobody created a "Vaccine" that would spread itself back to all the infected nodes. The code can't be that hard to crack to determine how to insert new functionality into the infected hosts. Just inject a new command to spread this update to all your peers and after you succeed, close down all of the command and control vectors. Cleanup and fixing the holes originally used for infection would clearly be useful too, but unnecessary to contain the damage. Really there are tons of things you could do.

I mean this might create an "arms race" where they continue to lock down access to the botnet, but I would love to see the looks on their faces when large sections of the botnet stop responding to commands.

Seriously as "Brilliant" as these guys are I guarantee there are probably people smarter that can crack their network. I know what I am talking about is probably not legal, but it surely is ethical.

Need editors who EDIT

[The Monster]

Arguably, what is needed is the low-tech sort of spell-checker. Before we had automated computer programs, newspapers had people called 'copy editors' who would proofread the articles submitted by the reporters. They were looking not only for spelling, grammar, and usage problems, but they also would do fact-checking.

Perhaps we could make the distinction clear this way: A machine that sells soft drinks is often referred to as a 'vender', while the guy selling hot dogs is more likely to be called a 'vendor'. With that in mind, I have toyed with a similar convention for other verb+er nouns:

The person who checks spelling could be a spell-checkor, and the computer program would remain the spell-checker; the human surfing the Web would be a browsor, using a browser program. Programs such as vi or emacs would be editers....

It's got as good a chance of adoption as *bibyte does.

Now, if Cmdr Taco could just get editors who actually EDIT... Oh. He's the 'editor' who ran this story? Never mind.

You don't have to download the file to be infected

[sjmurdoch]

Actually, if you're using an unpatched browser, you might not even have to download the file they offer to be infected. The web page includes Javascript exploits for half a dozen security vulnerabilities, which will install the trojan without user interaction. I've posted an analysis of the malware code on my blog.

Despite what the article says, Storm isn't using Tor (other than trying to exploit it's reputation) and the download isn't a trojaned version of Tor – it's much too small to be that. What's more, the botnet operators appear to have dropped this strategy. While on Thursday the links in the spam went to a fake Tor download page, on Friday they showed a fake YouTube video, and now they show a fake NFL game tracker.

Um... excuse you?

[Linkiroth]

Your link didn't work.

This is *not* using the Tor network or software

[shava]

This attack is not using our network or our software, only abusing our reputation. We sent this release to slashdot and others, days ago:

====
The Tor Project, a US non-profit organisation producing Internet
privacy software, is issuing an urgent warning about a spam email
being circulated as a fake promotion for their software.

The real Tor software provides privacy on the Internet to journalists,
bloggers and human rights activists all over the world. The spam email
promotes the virtues of the software, but then directs people to a
series of fake websites that contain malicious code that will attempt
to take over visiting machines, and the downloaded software is fake
and equally dangerous to run.

The real website is hosted at http://tor.eff.org/ and the Tor
software can be downloaded from there. Users are able to check that
they have received the official version by following the instructions
at: http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/Ver ifyingSignatures

Shava Nerad, Development Director for the Tor Project said, "I am
disgusted that criminals who want to recruit more machines for their
illegal activities should trade on our reputation for providing
privacy on the Internet. Fortunately we already have systems in place
so that people can verify that they are downloading the official
software. But this is a distraction from our work that we could do
without."
====

This stuff makes us sad. But you won't even get a trojanned client, just a trojan. And the page you click through to will try to exploit holes in your browser security, so don't even click through.

Yrs,
Shava Nerad
Development Director
The Tor Project