Storm Worm Botnet Partitions May Be Up For Sale

Bowling for cents writes "There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, and a ZDNet post thinks that's a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers. The latest variants of Storm are now using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet/eDonkey peer-to-peer traffic, meaning that each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key. This effectively allows the Storm author to segment the Storm botnet into smaller networks. This could be a precursor to selling Storm to other spammers, as an end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities."

Comments

Re:What is fast flux DNS?

[Ant P.]

It means the spammers register a bunch of domain names to spam in their emails, and rotate the zombie PC IP they're pointing to every few minutes. Makes it harder to shut down.

Slashvertising.

[onion2k]

This slashvertising has reached a new low. ;)

How long before..

[monk.e.boy]

How long before Storm is better than the Internet?

It seems to be peer-2-peer, can host files, must be reliable (DNS and all that), encrypted traffic.

If you assume Internet is past its sell by date, what would the next generation network look like?

:-)

(OK, maybe it wouldn't be owned by the mafia (insert USA joke here))

Clever

[Billosaur]

The malware attacks behind this botnet have been relentless all year, using a wide range of clever social engineering lures to trick Windows users into downloading executable files with rootkit components.

Windows has downloaded a new security update. Do you wish to install?

CmdrTaco is behind this

[Experiment 626]

The updates are part of the Slashdot tenth anniversary auction. In addition to the @slashdot.org address and low user id, CmdrTaco has also gotten the operators of the Storm Worm Botnet to auction its use off as part of the charity action.

Some potential uses for the winning bidder:

• No longer will you have to only imagine having a Beowulf cluster of those.
• Create your own Slashdot effect at the push of a button.
• Thousands of Slashdot sock puppet accounts at your beck and call, ready to mod you up, karma-assassinate your foes, or post supportive replies to all the drivel you post.
• Bring the parallel power of distributed computing to bear on problems like cracking DRM, modelling global warming, or ray tracing pictures of Natalie Portman with hot grits.
• DDOS the RIAA / SCO / Diebold / whoever and become an instant Slashdot hero.
• In Soviet Russia, spammers inboxes get flooded by YOU!

Yes.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Simple answer, complex solution.

First your firewall, useless (against storm). One of the attack paths of storm is to get YOU the user to visit an infected site, often by sending you an email. Unless your firewall somehow knows ALL infected sites and blocks them all (unlikely) the email will arrive, and the site will be visited and the trojan loaded. You could setup a firewall that protects against this, but you don't have one, because if you did, you wouldn't have to ask, you would know. Firewalls only help against worm attacks, were an outside computer probes your network for weaknesses. IF you configure your firewall extremely rigidly and only allow known traffic through it, then malware on your network could be blinded, unable to connect to any command parts of the storm network. It is possible to use for instance iptables (linux) to inspect all packages going through it and simply drop unwanted traffic. Since storm now apparently uses encrypted p2p(edonkey) traffic this shouldn't even be too hard. This would however result in a less userfriendly network. The only experience I got was in a setup that ONLY wanted regular HTTP traffic, and this meant a LOT of stuff failed, even web traffic because not all web application create proper headers. (I wonder what the recent MS stealth update means for windows, did this traffic pass unseen through software firewalls?)

Then your AV software. Forget about it, storm mutates itself. Since AV software mostly works with signatures, it can never be uptodate enough. I read a report that it changes every half hour. How the hell are you going to keep your signature data that uptodate?

Windows patches. They ain't uptodate thanks to MS dreaded patch tuesday. THis means that a security hole can EASILY be unpatched for weeks. COnsidering this is MS we are talking about, practice is far longer. You will be the target of exploits MS does not know about yet, won't develop a patch for for months, that they will delay for weeks to deploy and for which the AV companies do not have signature.

Anyway the most recent big security hole involves PDF's, that is Adobe, nothing to do with MS. You have to be uptodate on EVERYTHING. That includes EVERY codec, every handler EVERY single piece of code on your computer. Have an image browser installed? Are you sure that not a single on of the image codecs it uses has a flaw? If you update one image browser are you sure that not one single program on your computer still uses an old library that is still vulnerable? Remember, if a storm attack only infects a fraction of a percentage of computers, they still got hundreds of thousands of machines.

START TO GET THE PICTURE?

Basically you are like a good soldier, who keeps his gun clean, doesn't screw with hookers and stays awake on guard asking how well he standsup to a full out nuclear war. YOU ARE TOAST PRIVATE!

But there is hope, the most common form of infection is still through user interaction. YOU have to open the PDF, you have to execute the exe/scr/sh/dmg/whatever, you have to visit the link. The most powerfull attack is social engineering, get that soldier in his invincible armour to pickup a grenade and eat it.

The really odd thing is that you do not even have to be paranoid to avoid it. Just don't click on things. IF somebody sends you a story headline, visit the BBC site yourselve. If somebody wants to send you pictures of some celeb flashing her aging bits, don't. There is plenty of fresh porn with nice looking girls out there (cheggit.net).

So what do you need to stay safe?

Mostly, your brain. Disable every bit of automation in software and instead let your brain do the thinking. NEVER just use automatic install (spyware) and never allow for instance outlook to preload crap or preview stuff. Email is for text, not webpages. But mostly ask yourselve WHO is sending me this, and WHY. One of the most amazing attacks I seen was by sending a "joke" attachment to people in your address book. Here is a hint, I am dutch. My brother I