Korean DDoS Bots To Self-Destruct

tsu doh nimh writes "Several news sources are reporting that the tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows systems infected with the Mydoom worm and being used in an ongoing denial of service attack against US and S. Korean government Web sites will likely have their hard drives wiped of data come Friday. From The Washington Post's Security Fix blog, the malware is 'designed to download a payload from a set of Web servers. Included in that payload is a Trojan horse program that overwrites the data on the hard drive with a message that reads "memory of the independence day," followed by as many "u" characters as it takes to write over every sector of every physical drive attached to the compromised system.' ChannelNews Asia carries similar information."

Comments

Re:Really that bad of a thing?

[rodgster]

hhhmmm

I wonder if the backbone network admins are going to block access to that "set of web servers" or just let nature take it course.

Blood in the water

[Pecisk]

This will be ugly and exciting at once. First of all, I bet all mob supported worm writers will be fuming, because someone broke silent agreement that there should be no destructive viruses, otherwise people would start to actually care. And if people care => more correctly patched boxes => less posibility to own them => no profit at all.

Second, it will send very interesting message to people who have ignored subject of IT security so far. Imagine company with 100 computers suddenly standing on nothing but the air - no data, no OSes to work with, nothing. Third, I am afraid that some control maniacs (those who usually end with having an actual power to be maniacal) will use it as an excuse to impose more control on Internet. Of course, it will be laughted at by serious IT security specs, but those freaks will freak out and it will be interesting and frightening at same time.

Re:Really that bad of a thing?

[rtfa-troll]

This sounds like an excellent opportunity four a counter-hack.

no

If you follow the chain of computers back to the source, won't it end up in the opponent's critical systems?

likely not.

The people behind this are probably reasonably good at what they are doing. Most likely it will at best lead to a compromised host which is being controlled remotely. Very likely the loss of the actual original control system where the bot herder is sitting would not be a big deal. Probably there will be one or more levels where you will go through a P2P network which doesn't make it clear at all where the commands are coming from. The only way to be absolutely sure is to actually raid the physical location where the bot control is coming from and catch the guy at his keyboard.

Having said that, counter-hacking might be a useful investigative technique. If it was legal.

Re:+1 Insightful

[religious freak]

Who wants to take odds that a malware author will act to save these machines? It's not an impossibility - who would want to potentially lose many thousand boxes when you could just push a fix down to the machines? These machines are assets in the malware authors' "business".

It'll be interesting to watch. If it happens, it'll be kind of like a geek version of spy vs spy.

Re:Really that bad of a thing?

[SilentMobius]

No, the GP isn't right.

A computer is a multi-function device its strength is that it can attempt most task. A car is a mono-function device. If you want people to have safe malware-free devices you need to convince them to buy an Email appliance, Web browsing appliance, Movie-playing appliance, Desktop-publishing appliance, etc etc. Then there is a possibility (after the market matures) that these can be secure by-design. But people don't want that, they want a machine that is cheap and does everything, except the things that they don't want it to do, and they want the machine to know the difference even if they don't.

And that? that will never happen IMHO.

Re:Apple viral marketing campaign

[EdIII]

Plus, it launched on July 4th, not a particularly significant day for North Koreans... And while anybody could look it up, who here can say they know the dates of big Chinese holidays? Really?

Actually, you're just plain wrong about that. July 4th is a very important day for North Koreans. It is when Americans celebrate their independence, and their capitalist freedoms. The propaganda in North Korea starts from a very young age. July 4th is a bad day for North Koreans and they are taught that THAT day is when their mortal enemy celebrates and plots their demise.

So, North Korea deciding to launch missiles or a cyber-attack on July 4th, is no coincidence. Not by a long shot. It's the exact opposite of what you are thinking. July 4th is the perfectly appropriate day to launch attacks against America.

Keep in mind, the war between the U.S and North Korea never ended. It has been in a cease-fire for over 50 years. They are not over it. Far from it. I would even say they are still obsessed and paranoid about the U.S attacking any minute. There are a lot of mentally unstable and brainwashed people in North Korea. Aside from the special elite families (in glorious Animal Farm tradition), that get to enjoy all the perks of Western culture, the rest of the people, including highly ranked military officers are very misinformed people with a deep suspicion and hatred of the U.S.

I would suggest you read about defectors and refugees from North Korea that actually make it out of the country. When interviewed, these people state beliefs in the most outlandish and bizarre pieces of propaganda. Situations like women absolutely convinced that if they touch dropped pamphlets from the South (through air campaigns to spread information to the people) that their hands will rot off . When asked, if they really felt it was true, they state that they really believed it. That's just one example.

So it's not far fetched at all, that July 4th is a day when North Koreans feel hatred and fear.

And now, it's doing exactly what good worms NEVER do... Killing their hosts, and themselves, suddenly, flagrantly, and unnecessarily. Exactly what any of us would wish to do with zombie PCs.

So, it seems pretty damn likely it was in fact anti-malicious. Some misguided white-hat who thinks drawing attention and cause a small bit of undeniable pain is the only way to make things get better. Frankly, it sounds like the ideal NSA fund raiser...

That's very plausible. Botnets are valuable right now. Destroying this Botnet, is in fact, destroying VALUABLE INVENTORY. For organized cyber criminals, this makes no sense whatsoever to destroy what they worked so hard to obtain, or spent money to purchase.

I admit, it does not sound like what criminals would do at all. All that loss, just to possibly cover their tracks a little?

A "white-hat" trying to make a point though? What better way then to cause a little mischief and then mercifully destroy the tools. Your argument is compelling....

Re:Apple viral marketing campaign

[Bert64]

Or for a blackhat, what better way to divert the blame?
Bots are plentiful, insecure windows boxes are extremely abundant and it will be easy for them to acquire more, they probably haven't even diverted all of their current resources to this attack.
The machines that get wiped will likely just be reinstalled from the recovery cd that came with the machine, thus returning them to the same vulnerable state they were in before - ready to be reowned.

Incidentally, if you've ever looked at a compromised machine, there's typically lots of different pieces of malware on them, most infected boxes tend to be shared between several groups and some end up a battleground between competing groups trying to remove each others' malware.