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Twitter Used To Control Botnet Machines
DikSeaCup writes "Arbor Network's Jose Nazario, an expert on botnets, discovered what looks to be the first reported case of hackers using Twitter to control botnets. 'Hackers have long used IRC chat rooms to control botnets, and have continually used clever technologies, such as peer-to-peer strategies, to counter efforts to track, disrupt and sometimes decapitate the bots. Perhaps what's surprising then is that it's taken so long for hackers to take Twitter to the dark side.' The next step, of course, is to code the tweets in such a way that they aren't so suspicious."
More reasons to hate Twitter
Sure Twitter is just a large botnet, but is anyone really in control?
Who knew Twitter had a use?!?!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Twitter isn't as reliable as IRC.
This is a boring sig
This is about as interesting and informative as everything else being posted to Twitter!!
:D
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/08/botnet_arbor.jpg
There's something ironic about this finding, given that Russian hackers allegedly used a botnet to take Twitter down for two days last week. But we won't go down that rabbit hole.
That's actually an interesting thought... it was sending obfuscated URLs to code that the zombie bots would download and execute.
Wouldn't it make sense, rather than having Twitter simply kill the account, to allow the "good" guys to craft some sort of zombie-self-destruct and tweet its URL over the account? Imagine, all the bots automatically downloading and executing a specially designed tool that removes the malicious trojan...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
"Twitter Used To Control Botnet Machines"
It used to, but it doesn't anymore, right?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Jose and those guys at Arbor are doing really concrete things to curb botnets and malware contagion. They have their gear in a great number of peering points around the world, and are correlating huge amounts of data into discrete patterns. I've seen Jose speak a couple of times, and I am impressed by the manner in which they are finding the ghosts who think they can't be found.
Wouldn't it be weird if someone made a botnet that would follow the directions of anyone that posted on Twitter, with people being able to suggest one command per day that would get upped or down by the masses? Aside from the programmer, who would be held responsible if it were operated like that?
Anything that can be pinged and return any sort of tcp/ip packets could be a control center if the contents of the packets can actually
be translatable and have been mapped accordingly.
ie- ftp server has certain verbose return that may be configured based on what is being done, so the botnet program calls home to an ftp server...looking like a plain jane communication to any one looking. It tries a few different commands to which the ftp server can reply (with error messages) it can not proceed, however inside the ftp server error message is a text string that contains certain
key phrases.
This scenario is similar to steganography, of hiding in plain sight, inside an image, the contents of data....
I think it's cool to be able to pass off information that is hidden to regular onlookers, but is a lot of coding for nothing if you ask me.
Set up a twitter account where a particular page has the commands for all your bots to follow, and....wait a minute....
No onE would Think of uSing slashdoT As we aRen'T nearly as oBviOus as someThiNg likE Twitter. // Especially with all our talk about supporting Linux and such.
Sure they tried using Twitter to control their botnet but after sending out one set of instructions they got bored and went back to playing MafiaWars on Facebook.
The next step, of course, is to code the tweets in such a way that they aren't so suspicious
And people said that perl obfuscation, poetry, and golf tournaments didn't have any practical application. Ha!
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
From the looks of it it's all base64 encoded shortened URLs.
aHR0cDovL2 is http:///
aHR0cDovL2JpdC5seS is http://bit.ly/
The first one is clipped.
The rest go to a pastebinish sites which have gbpm.exe encoded as Base64. It also appears the base64 is different but the exe has the same name (I'm guessing it's changed 'output'?)
http://rifers.org/paste/content/paste/9507/body?key=upd4t3
http://rifers.org/paste/content/paste/9508/body?key=upd4t3
http://rifers.org/paste/content/paste/9509/body?key=upd4t3
They also use Pastebin (http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?dl=m49f3b4c2) and Debian.net (http://paste.debian.net/44059/download/44059) but both of those file have been deleted.
d2hpbGUgKHRydWUpIHsNCiAgICBwaW5nIHR3aXR0ZXIuY29tDQp9
[to be posted uh tomorrow, probably]
Only 98% of Twitter updates are "pointless babble," says a new report that studied 2,000 tweets over a period of two weeks.
The top category was "pointless babble" tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.
Almost 2% was Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or retweets thereof and the rest was Warren Ellis posting scatological abuse of his fans.
Botnet command messages were becoming more popular, many disguised as combinations of the syllables "lol" "wtf" "d00d" "RT" and "#fb" or scatological abuse of Warren Ellis's fans.
Twitter's demographics as of June 2009 were 55% female, 43% ages 18 to 34, 78% white, and 99.5% of such short attention spans that Facebook might as well be War and Peace. Botnet readership was considered likely to rise as soon, nothing with organic intelligence would be able to cope.
Twitter recently redesigned its homepage, changing the tag "What are you doing now?" to "Post tomorrow's CNN headlines, particularly about #goatse."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
There ain't any technology that one human(s) can come up with that another human(s) can't corrupt.
I don't care how quick, savvy or exotic you are, you're not going to foil everyone forever. I figure it's just a state of grace we have: there's a situation whereby the technology is benign, if asinie; a state whereby it's corrupted, abused and malicious; and a state whereby it's antiquated, unused, and maligned.
I hope Twitter's now made it to that last stage now.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson