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"Crimeserver" Full of Personal/Business Data Found
Presto Vivace sends news of a server found by security firm Finjan that contained a 1.4-GB cache of stolen data, accumulated over a period of less than a month from compromised PCs around the world. The "crimeserver," as Finjan dubs it, "provided command and control functions for malware attacks in addition to being a drop site for data harvested from compromised computers. ... The stolen data consisted of 5,388 unique log files including 1,037 from Turkey, 621 from Germany, 571 from the United States, 322 from France, 308 from India and 232 from Britain." Oddly enough, the data was stored in the open, with not even basic auth to protect it. Finjan notes in their press release that this huge trove of data gathered over a short period of time indicates that the crimeware problem is far larger than most observers have been assuming. Update: 05/08 12:29 GMT by T : Note, the security firm involved is spelled "Finjan," not "Finjin" as originally shown.
Why would they need basic auth? After all, the security on the compromised computers was bad enough for them, complete random strangers to the owners of the PCs, to bypass system authentication and authorization controls to grab the data in the first place.
My blog
"The server was not secure at all. It indicates that these people that are doing the crime today, they are not security experts, they are not computer science experts." Uhhh....So someone knocks over a liquor store with a 9 mm. Does that mean that he's a gunsmith or a sharpshooter, or skilled in advanced war-fighting techniques of some kind? No...Chances are he's a just a guy with a gun. People use whatever they can to take what they want. Film at eleven.
I know it's just a rehash of a press release, likely taken out of context from what was originally said, but - WTF?
If it's that easy, I'm gonna try it....
Did you consider the fact that the stuff that does all the hard work is actuallySo they're not trying to help at all. What they're trying to do is sell their services and using this pseudo-news article to do it. Shame on them.
Oddly enough, the data was stored in the open, with not even basic auth to protect it.
Sounds like they found a honeypot or a decoy to me. Now that the bad guys know that the good guys are on to them, they can disappear into the ether for a while until the heat dies down.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Perhaps this data was intentionally left out in the open by whoever had it first?
If you think about it, if you just hacked into a users pc and nicked something (credit card info, passwords, whatever) and used them quietly to some degree, wouldn't you WANT someone else to use them, perhaps not so quietly? I mean, you want a fall guy right? Let the next script kiddie run through and take the fall. With a bit of luck, they will pin all the activity on the new guy rather than the guy who carefully used this once, then let the information loose on the masses.
It's not "accidentally" or "stupidly" left unprotected, it's a perfect smoke screen to cover tracks if you ask me.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Unless the criminal is a complete idiot there's more than one drop spot...
/var/log/maillog on my servers would certainly reveal "business-related email communications" in the sense of senders and recipients. Mail logs might also contain some entries for mail between providers and patients or between banks and their customers. Apache logs wouldn't be so useful, though they do contain the usernames when Basic Authentication is used. But none of those logs would reveal much about the content of those communications. I don't know anything about Outlook so I have no idea how its logs might reveal "captured Outlook accounts containing email communication."
Indeed. If I were writing botnet software I'd distribute multiple copies of the collected data across a number of the compromised computers. The press release and article abstract indicate that the botnet control programs and the data were located in the same place. That doesn't seem like a particularly good architecture for this type of system. I'd keep the command programs far away from the harvested data. My hunch is that the data aren't that valuable as I outline below.
I can accept that buying, installing and running a botnet could be as easy as installing an RPM. What appears more disturbing is the reported "timeframe of less than a month" to harvest over 5,000 records. But what kind of records are these? Finjan tells us that the data "consisted of 5,388 unique log files [my emphasis]. Both email communications and web-related data were among them."
They go on to list some specific examples:
Compromised patient data
Compromised bank customer data
Business-related email communications
Captured Outlook accounts containing email communication
I'd be curious to see how much actual "patient" or "bank customer" data is revealed in "log files."
Still if all they got after a month were logs, I'm not sure how valuable they would be unless the goal was harvesting addresses for spamming or phishing. Capturing the logs of compromised mail servers would certainly yield a pretty high proportion of legitimate addresses, especially recipient addresses. This method seems especially attractive if you're trying to identify targets for "spear-phishing." If you can compromise some corporate mail servers, you can build up a nice list to "spear."
So I'm guessing Finjan found a machine containing some 5,600 mail server "log files" totalling 1.4 GB. Since the logs are worthless once the addresses are harvested, protecting them isn't much of a priority. I suppose competitive spammers might want to keep these potentially higher-yielding names to themselves, but given the volumes at which spammers operate, they probably don't care.
I think I'll go take a look at my mail servers now just to ease my mind.