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Torpig Botnet Hijacked and Dissected
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara have hijacked the infamous Torpig botnet for 10 days. They have released a report (PDF) that describes how that was done and the data they collected. They observed more than 180K infected machines (this is the number of actual bots, not just IP addresses), collected 70GB of data stolen by the Torpig trojan, extracted almost 10K bank accounts and credit card numbers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the underground market, and examined the privacy threats that this trojan poses to its victims. Considering that Torpig has been around at least since 2006, isn't it time to finally get rid of it?"
why dont they just send a self destruct/uninstall command and kill it or would that be too simple ?
no, maybe, oh I don't know. Why do I get all the hard questions?
The BBC got in trouble when they took control of a botnet for one of their technology shows: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/12/bbc-botnet-legality-questioned. While this research was performed in the US, I think they must have broken a law somewhere. I don't see how grabbing personal info obtained illegally for the sake of research, even if they didn't infect the computers originally, makes it permissible under US law.
Take a machine. Install Windows XP SP1. Hook it to an unfiltered intenet access. Watch Sasser install. Mean time before infection: 30 seconds.
That nuisance is 5 years old and still running rampart. Now, far from being the threat that Torpig is, but it shows you just how hard it is to get rid of something. And unlike Torpig, it's not really "in use" anymore. Its maker is gone, it doesn't get any updates or new variants to faciliate infection. We're talking about the same old crapware that every single AV kit knows and removes by now. Worse, it's a threat that any halfway decently patched machine is not susceptible to.
And you want to get rid of Torpig?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How about we make the punishment for infecting a computer $100 and one day in jail for each system you infect. This way, someone who does something stupid but isn't actually malicious pays a few hundred dollars and spends a few days in jail while the real criminals pay big bucks and spend years in jail. For 180k systems, that's an eighteen million dollar fine and nearly five hundred years of jail time.
Of course, the problem is catching these bastards who tend to live in countries where the government doesn't care or is actively involved in these illegal activities (I'm looking at you Russia).
-- Will program for bandwidth
Let me get this straight. They took over a botnet, which consists of computers they are unauthorized to access. Not only did they commit a felony but then they wrote a paper about it?
The reason that nobody else has done this before is not because they are incapable of doing it. The reason nobody has done this before is because it is illegal
Getting altruism out of people is hard enough at the best of times. Asking for altruism when the likely reward is getting arrested.. no.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Probably, but some well placed vigilante hacking could help the world. I mean if they have control how hard would it be to let that person know that they have a trojan. And to give directions on how to remove it
Unfortunately, that process would soon be usurped. There already is a class of malware called "rouge anti-virus" that gives false removal instructions, resulting in infection.
Better would be to plug the holes, and plug them fast enough so that you can't drive the proverbial slow moving truck, carrying a payload of *wares, through them.
What bothered me after reading this paper is nowhere does this paper come out and say that the infected machines are all running Windows, although this is strongly implied by the description of how the virus works. The reader is left to wonder whether machines other than Microsoft Windows were infected.
Instead, the paper leaves the impression that all computing has the same architectural vulnerabilities. I thought that was a surprising defect, sufficient to make me wonder what else isn't captured/stated/analyzed in the paper.
It IS a crime. If they had control access to the botnet, then for the duration of time that they had control, they were responsible for what the botnet did during that time. Think of it as timeshare cracking.
Why does this sound like a cross between an Onion and Swine Flu?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Give him a CD with XP which includes SP3
I'm curious: how would I go about producing such a CD, without any of my boxes getting "sassered"?
I have: a Linux box. An OS-less laptop. Some XP recovery disks.
Another analogy is that it's like buying a house at the address 1234 Main Street, Anywhere, USA knowing that other people would try to deliver packages to your address with a "Dear Occupant" label. It's not illegal to open those at all.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Perhaps not. If I understand it correctly they acquired the domain (legally) and their only "control" act was to send the proper response when queried to find if they were the "masters". They then accepted the stolen data (that might well be a crime in itself though). Beyond saying "We are the correct site to send to" they don't seem to have sent any commands. Other than being in receipt of stolen data I don't think they could really be said to have any criminal acts here.
Greetings and Salutations... /., it is even more amazing.
I have to say that the level of misunderstanding exhibited by MOST of the folks posting to this thread boggles the mind. Considering the alleged level of IT sophistication of the readers of
I read the researcher's report, and, I have to say that I found it a well-reasoned and interesting analysis of a terrible problem on the Internet. However, without following their methodology, I do not believe they could have been able to do any where close to this level of analysis. These researchers not only produced a fairly scholarly analysis of a nasty and persistent problem, but, apparently went out of their way to work with the governmental authorities charged with controlling these sorts of crimes. So...why all the calls for them to be drawn and quartered in the public square? Have none of you ever heard of the concept of studying your enemy on a deep level, so to find its weaknesses, and make it easier to destroy? And as a part of that how do you propose to GATHER that information, short of following procedures that these researchers used?
There are only a few, small quibbles I have with the paper. While they do say that they took a number of steps to secure the private information that they gathered while researching this virus, I would feel much better about reality if there was some assurance that this data set had been destroyed at the end of the study. I realise that arguments can be made that information, once gathered, tends to exist forever (after all, can we be sure that no copies were made?). However, with sufficient audit trails of what happened to the data, and who accessed it, this is a minimal problem. Of course, if the folks whose data had been intercepted were, indeed, contacted and made aware of the breach of their privacy, the usefulness of this data would erode away quickly, as CC numbers/banking information/passwords/etc were changed.
Also, it was unclear to me exactly how they attempted to contact the people whose information had been compromised. Mainly this is curiosity on my part, because most of the methods that spring to mind (Email, IM, etc), are exactly the sorts of communications that I tend to filter out and delete with out any further attention. I suppose that a phone call from a complete stranger would certainly be a wake-up call, though.
As for their activities being "illegal", while perhaps technically true, It is more a problem with the way the laws are written, rather than with their activities. Most folks do not understand that applying the law to a bad situation is akin to using a 20 lb sledgehammer to swat a mosquito. it is not a precision instrument. That is one of the many reasons that the justice system in America has avenues for appealing a case through several levels of juries and judges. The hope is that with enough people looking at it, a sane interpretation of the law will take root. Most of the current laws dealing with computer access and IT these days DO make security research difficult and problimatical, as their wording exposes even legitimate researchers to criminal charges. That is a legislative problem, though, and, not a sign that serious researchers who are trying to understand a complex and interesting problem on the net are "Doing Evil".
In short...if you like eating sausage, you should NEVER watch it being made.
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Fortunately they're quite easy to spot due to the red coloration.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's quite probable that this information (and particularly the techniques used to hijack the botnets) are also new and valuable to law-enforcement agencies. Such agencies tend to be desperately short of intelligence (both kinds), under-equipped to do research, and usually operate in a purely reactive way ("show us the bodies and we'll investigate").
And yes, I think that the researchers did fine by hijacking a botnet in the first place and secondly by not destroying it but instead contacting law-enforcement agencies. Researchers are neither law enforcement officers nor sysadmins for the infected systems. They have their own work to do (which law-enforcement agencies could not or would not do, or the Torpig botnet would have been cleaned up long ago).
It is interesting to note that *all* of the infected machines seem to be MS Windows based. Even though many of the targeted clients (Firefox, Skype) also run on Linux machines. If I had to guess I'd say that under Linux the need to have root access to either modify the MBR or to write downloaded malware code to the targeted executables on disk provides an effective barrier to infection (provided you don't surf the net with root privileges of course).
Unfortunately the publication of this sort of research may lead botnet administrators and designers to address the authentification weakness the researchers exploited. Ah well, such is life.
First of all, the whole exercise was cut short because the botnet admins updated the Mebroot toolkit, causing the researchers to loose contact. That happened before publication, ok? Secondly it shows that the easiest way to protect your botnet is to update Mebroot once a week (or sooner), and savvy botnet admins already knew that.
The big plus is that this research unequivocally points out MS Windows users' ability to write to the MBR and to modify executables as the main strategic access point. The general public didn't know that before. Now it does and it might decide that this is something that must be addressed. Either by switching to Linux or by more careful login management or by pounding the desk in Redmond and demanding a fix. Nothing else could have done that.
In addition it highlights the crucial importance of ISPs and registrars to respond immediately (and intelligently) to complaints of abuse. As the researchers point out, there is scope for streamlining and actually *using* existing procedures to terminate a registrar's accreditation. There may also be scope for legislation here in compelling any ISP or registrar to maintain a certain minimum capability for investigating abuse, and for instituting a legally binding maximum timespan between complaint and investigation. I would personally favour legislation to force those registrars and ISPs who do not have that capability out of business (or compel them to be taken over) within a year or so. That's something that would have been impossible to justify without this research.
So in short, the small disadvantage of alerting botnet admins to a vulnerability is far outweighed by the intelligence gathered. Intelligence that *must* be made public before it can be acted upon due to institutional torpor, stupidity, or tardiness.
random speculation
So if you take the paradigms of open source and apply the benefits of free and open criticism of a project then the ultimate change of this paper should be a better Torpig. As such, I wonder how long it will be before some of the methods mentioned in the paper that made Torpig vulnerable to takeover will quietly disappear...
Torpig will doubtless allow updates to itself - allowing for current C&C commands to take varied action for example. Updating the infected machines with code that is less resistant to domain flux and hence preventing the injection of other C&C servers may be something achievable. After the publishing of a paper like this I'd be unsurprised if the code was not already undergoing update and that some of the methods in the paper weren't already out of date.
Then again, I do wonder if publishing this at this time is due to the botnet already having moved on and therefore the techniques not longer available. Publishing may otherwise be a little irresponsible if the agencies involved on the article are still using the techniques mentioned.
Then again, there are multiple other reasons for publishing this.
How about the reverse? If you are stupid enough to be hosting a botnet node, you are likely too stupid to know when an anti-botnet attack will affect your machine, nor are you likely to be able to identify such behavior as the cause of any damage to your machine.
Nobody would ever find out. Places like the Geek Squad are populated with people who are instructed to turn stuff over for a profit rather than solve problems, so they won't look for evidence of the battle. They'll just reformat the machine and hand it back. Hackers like us on Slashdot are already probably secure against a lot of this crapware, so we'd never be "reverse-attacked."
And who's to say which piece of malware caused the damage: the original trojan, or the anti-trojan? Even if it were traced down to the anti-trojan, what evidence would you have that it was sent by the researchers, and not by some anti-botnet-vigilante group?
I bet these researchers could release an anti-trojan and get away with it completely. As long as they do it silently, the meddling kids never find out who did it.
Even better: an alliance of anti-botnet researchers! To enter, you have to swear an oath to not rat out the other guys anti-botnet software. "We tried really really hard, but we couldn't figure out who sent it, sorry." No one would ever know.
John
It IS a crime. If they had control access to the botnet, then for the duration of time that they had control, they were responsible for what the botnet did during that time. Think of it as timeshare cracking.
I think you are confusing two similiar ideas. The ability to control and responsibility are two different things.
It would only be a crime if they did control it and command it to commit a crime. It is not a crime to be able to commit a crime.
Here is an illustration. Imagine that a criminal organization mistakenly gives its operatives your phone number and tell them to call it once a week, report their progress, and ask for new orders. You start receiving calls that go something like this:
Caller: I am John Smith. I stole 10 televisions. I have stashed them at 123 Main Street, Anytown. Do you have new orders for me? (You write this down and pass it on to the police.)
You: No, no new orders. Goodbye.
The case here is a little different, but not much. It is as if the researchers noticed that the criminals had been told to start using a new telephone number next month and managed to get it assigned to themselves because they were currious about what the criminals were up to.
This is true, but falsely assumes that incorrect use becomes correct over time. It doesn't matter how many rappers use the word "minute" to mean a long time, it is 60 seconds long and they are not using the word correctly. 90% of the population misusing a word doesn't make the use correct automagically. There is a reason why "aint" aint a word ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun