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Massive Botnet Returns From the Dead To Spam On
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer reports that the big spam-spewing Srizbi botnet, shut down two weeks ago when McColo was shuttered, has been resurrected and is again under the control of criminals, security researchers said today. As of late Tuesday, infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, which are now based in Estonia, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye. The comeback confirms what researchers noted last week, that Srizbi had a fallback strategy. So, in the end, that strategy paid off for the criminals who control the botnet."
Argh! Zombies!!!!! They're bound to be after brains! Well they'll find none here! Take that you evil zombies.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Further proof that crime doesn't pay. Unless you have a reliable business plan, of course.
-=Bang Bang=-
"the big spam-spewing Srizbi botnet, shut down two weeks ago when McColo was shuttered, has been resurrected and is again under the control of criminals"
I'd love to go back in the '50s, find one of those future drawing artists, show him that head news, and ask him to draw what he think that means in the year 2008.
Hilarity ensue.
Now do it again. Rinse, repeat, until there's nowhere left for them to host the "command and control" servers.
:-(
The sooner the better. My good:spam ratio is almost 5:95 at the moment
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
..most is how efficiently the bad guys always work. Its just astounding.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
I know it's off topic, but my machine was running great for a couple weeks... now its all slow again.
I have worked in more than a few offices that have no backup plans for when things go wrong; power outs, network outages, supply chain disruptions, and the like would stop work cold. I find it amusing that a band of criminals are running a more flexible and 'professional' operation than many ligament businesses.
We are the Borg...
They're not random dammit! they always occur where the real part is a half, well the non-trivial crashes anyway.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
... and a Coke
Is this because some idiot(s) let McColo get back online for a number of hours, or was that fallback already in place before the McColo initial shut down? These major ISP backbone providers reall need to be talking to each other when they blacklist a site so that one rogue provider doesn't undermine the good efforts of all the rest.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Anyone who is surprised by this, raise your hand. If someone was able to write the requisite application to gather the botnet, one would expect the same programmer to have the foresight to write in a way to re-gather and restart the botnet at a later point in time.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
While the command and control was down, they missed the chance to take out the bots too.
They also have to deal with various groups trying to stop them. As in TFA:
So the spammers had to have thought about and planned for such a contingency.
And still bring in enough money to pay for the connections they'll be using to control the zombies.
So while attempting to register the domain names, work was going on to update the zombie software.
The question now is how to get those hard-coded references to the various ISP's in the world so that they can block traffic to/from them and stop the zombies from updating again.
Why isn't information such as that ever included in these articles?
how efficiently the bad guys always work.
Not really - we only ever hear about the efficient ones here. Head on over to Fark (or even Youtube:) to get some examples of bad guys working....inefficiently.
Last post!
You don't have much experience battling hydras, do you?
Nice troll.
I think it might be more accurate to say if only they had a strategy.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So where are the US antiterrorism people? This is an attack on US assets by foreign nationals. We have a whole Department of Homeland Security. They had a good computer security guy in charge of dealing with such attacks, Amit Yoran, and he quit in 2004, fed up because DHS didn't really want to deal with real problems. His replacement was a career lobbyist. Really. "He served as Director of 3Com Corporation's Government Relations Office in Washington, DC where he was responsible for all aspects of the company's strategic public policy formulation and advocacy." That's America's first line of defense against cyberterrorism.
The FBI has an antiterrorism operation. What are they doing? What they say they're doing is working to "strengthen and support our top operational priorities: counterterrorism, counterintelligence, cyber, and major criminal programs." What they're actually doing is flying around the FBI director in the private jet purchased with antiterrorism funds.
FBI testimony before Congress, 2001: "The FBI believes cyber-terrorism, the use of cyber-tools to shut down, degrade, or deny critical national infrastructures, such as energy, transportation, communications, or government services, for the purpose of coercing or intimidating a government or civilian population, is clearly an emerging threat for which its must develop prevention, deterrence, and response capabilities."
FBI testimony before Congress, 2004: " In the event of a cyberterrorist attack, the FBI will conduct an intense post-incident investigation to determine the source including the motive and purpose of the attack."
So where's the action?
Heads need to roll at DHS and the FBI.
You could send an e-mail about command-and-control servers, to our Cyber Defence Center (Küberkaitse Keskus aka KKK) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCDCOE Estonia is not a big country at all so i think these new servers would be taken down pretty quickly.
What I wonder is, why don't some of those white/grey/black hat hackers out there don't try to hijack the botnets, spammers, or the control servers of the spammers and shut that shit down. I'm sure it would be challenging and billions would approve.
The way I see it, spam is a distributed problem that ignores virtually any boundary you can think of, so the solution must be equally pervasive and distributed. Such as an equally (dis)organized group of spammer-attackers. Sure some innocents will probably get nailed, but ain't war hell?
Question everything
There is no possible way any ISP would reconnect someone like McColo out of ignorance: TeliaSonera was bribed.
As far as I can see the only real solution to spam is intelligent filtering, which Google leads the way on: it's got to the point where if a spam mail gets through, I open it it up and have a good look at it to see how the heck it got through.
[FUCK BETA]
Tens of millions of American computers are under the direct control of hostile foreign interests. At any moment, they can be ordered to do anything by those interests, including erasing files, sending financial information, or attacking infrastructure sites. That's a much bigger threat than some guys mouthing off in a bar in Miami about blowing up some building, which got the FBI's full attention.
Or simply killing all those whose machines are infected? And if you think that any of those is acceptable then you surely won't have any objection if/when other nations start behaving that way in your country, will you? I know where most of my spam originates.
I have no problem with the infected machines being killed off, regardless of where the attacker that killed the machine is located or who the attacker is. Just leave some indication of why the machine was killed so I can point to it when charging the customer for re-installing their OS and recovering whatever of their files that you are kind enough to leave for them. A nice little README.txt file explaining "Your machine was a spam spewing zombie in the <botnet name> botnet." will be sufficient.
Note - Liberal use of <sarcasm> tags may or may not need to be applied.
Which part of "random crashing" is alleviated by Linux? The "random" or the "crashing"?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Because Srizbi has an algorithm that generates new pseudo-random domain names based on the current date. If the hard-coded C&C server ever goes down, the bot herder can calculate what domain names Srizbi will be looking to in the near future, and register them to reclaim the botnet (and push an update that changes the hard-coded server)
Technical Details of Srizbis domain generation algorithm
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
The Estonia based Command and Control servers have been kicked offline.
Only one server is still online, based in Frankfurt, Germany; name registered through the Cayman Islands.
This is not the server that's hard-coded in to the new Srizbi patch, just one of the backup servers supplying it.
source
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
...the one remaining 4800 baud link between Estonia and the rest of the world was taken down earlier today when IT technicians took control of the phone line to order a pizza.
Have gnu, will travel.
surely doing nothing is just like knowing a criminal has done a crime without reporting it, so you are deemed an aid to the crime if you let it happen.
Idiots.
Just do it under the table from a netcafe, and no one will complain, really, no one will, no body, bloody no one!!! Those guys have NO balls.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
What they should have done was this: Cut the provider's proverbial balls off. Then snap up the next ten or twenty domains. Connect them all to a server that instructs the bots that get there to uninstall themselves. I can see why they didn't, though; they could have been liable for any unintended effects (computers crashing, whatever), which is why that step should ideally have been done by some anonymous or pseudonymous party.