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2M New Websites a Year Compromised To Serve Malware

Posted by kdawson on from the wave-upon-wave dept.

SkiifGeek writes "Sophos claims that they are detecting 6,000 new sites daily that have been compromised to serve malware to unsuspecting site visitors, with 80% of site owners not aware that they have been compromised — though this figure is probably on the low side. With increasingly vocal arguments being put forward by security experts criticizing the performance and capability of site validation tools (though many of these experts offer their own tools and services for similar capabilities), and rising levels of blended attacks, perhaps it is time you reviewed the security of your site and what might be hiding in infrequently used directories."

13 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. How to Check a LAMP Server? by MankyD · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Everytime I read about a new form of server malware, I try to check a LAMP server that I run. So far I've come up clean but I've hardly done a full inspection. Anyone know of a good way to scan a set up? Sophos says that they are detecting thousands of new sites - how are they scanning them?

    --
    -dave
    http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
    1. Re:How to Check a LAMP Server? by Smidge204 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I thought about this myself. One possible solution that I considered would be to maintain a local list of files on your server and their CRC/Hash values. A script on the server would scan all the files and output a similar list than you could then check against your local copy and would quickly identify any new or changed files. This could be set to a cron job to do periodic scans or just initiate a manual scan whenever.

      Might not be the best solution but it should be easy to implement. Larger sites can do incremental scans. It would be harder to detect corruption of databases, though, unless you know what to look for or have a concrete way of validating the contents.
      =Smidge=

    2. Re:How to Check a LAMP Server? by Bongfish · · Score: 2, Informative

      For this, you'd want to use something like Tripwire or AIDE. It's been used for years, and will detect changes to files.

      You're right that it won't help you detect that somebody has managed to insert a chunk of javascript or PHP in your insecure mySQL/PHP web app, though. Perhaps a combination of Snort, Ntop (if it wasn't shit), a "hardened" PHP binary and config, and log monitoring would alert you in the case of an attack.

      The problem is that there's a lot of badly written or out of date software out there that can be exploited, even without discovering new holes. If you're running this sort of thing and making it publicly accessible over the net, somebody is going to take advantage of it.

  2. Hmm, time to improve the common tools by davidwr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps the time has come to harden the "common stacks" so certain switches are off.

    For example, once you set up your web site, "lock it" so if there are any changes to files or directories that shouldn't change, the site will break in a non-harmful way rather than be compromised.

    If and when these files need updating, the "unlock" process should be done using a tool independent of the main web-server process, perhaps by using a different web-server process running on a different port or even a process on a different computer that validates the request then passes it on to the main web server.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  3. virtualized rootkits by Speare · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Okay, say someone's site is served by an ISP. The ISP gives the site owner a shell account and manages the LAMP infrastructure. The shell account is likely a virtualized instance, meant to limit the damage that each little site can do to the hosted infrastructure, not to limit the damage that the host does to little sites or their visitors. How can the site owner "check their own site" in such a case? Virtualization itself is a sort of rootkit conceptually, so how can the virtualized account check for malicious rootkits in its own instance or in the greater infrastructure?

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
  4. Completely useless. by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Until they release the fricking list of IP addresses or Domain names.

    I would love to put that list in my squid blocking file to protect my users.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  5. what does this look like from the client? by oni · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I run FF and keep it patched, am I safe? If I did get compromised, what would the symptoms be?

    I tend to think that keeping my OS patched keeps me pretty safe, but there's always a delay after a new vulnerability is discovered before the patches come out (the zero day) and what concerns me is that if someone has a very large network of compromised web servers, they can roll out a zero day vulnerability to all of them and do a lot of damage.

    As to symptoms, I think spyware used to be the big problem, and infected computers would have popups and such. But now I think that infected machines will be used primarily to send spam. Is that correct?

  6. Re:KDAWSON--Please, please read this and respond by flydpnkrtn · · Score: 2, Informative

    OK I know I'm feeding the trolls but you know you can choose to NOT see certain authors' stories under Preferences->Homepage, right?

    --
    Here's to the crazy ones
  7. What I wanna know is ... by jc42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When do we get a FOSS runtime library for using this valuable public resource?

    Imagine all the useful things we could do for the world if we all had access to this distributed computing power.

    --
    Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  8. Yes... by SigmundFloyd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sophos claims that they are detecting 6,000 new sites daily that have been compromised to serve malware
    ...but do they run Linux?
    --
    Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
  9. Somebody should warn... by gzerphey · · Score: 2, Funny

    Somebody should warn 3M that they are next. I'm sure they would want to prepare. Ok, sorry I'll get my coat.

    --
    I don't have a microwave. I do, however, have a clock that occasionally cooks shit.
  10. Radmind by fitterhappier · · Score: 2, Informative

    Radmind: http://radmind.org/. Radmind's is designed for this purpose exactly. It's a tripwire with the ability to roll back changes, or capture them and store them for deployment to other systems.

  11. Vendor FUD or Real? by a-zarkon! · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I for one would like some description of how they're detecting these 6000 new sites per day. Also, what are they considering a website? Do they include bot systems that configured to listen on port 80 as part of the worm propagation and command/control? That's not really a website in my opinion, but it may be in theirs. It would be great if they published a list of the 42000 new websites they have discovered over the past 7 days, you know just to back up their claim. Wouldn't hurt to notify the owners of those sites that they've got a problem.

    Absent more detail, I am calling shenanigans on this statistic, Sophos, and the Register. I am soooo sick of the FUD.

    Harumph!