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Up To 9% of a Company's Machines Are Bot-Infected
ancientribe sends in a DarkReading piece on the expanding footprint of small, targeted botnets in enterprises. "Bot infections are on the rise in businesses, and most come from botnets you've never heard of nor ever will. Botnet researchers at Damballa have found that nearly 60 percent of bot infections in organizations are from bot armies with only a handful to a few hundred bots built to target a particular organization. Only 5 percent of the bot infections were from big-name botnets, such as Zeus/ZDbot and Koobface. And more businesses are getting hit: 7 to 9 percent of an organization's machines are bot-infected, up from 5-to-7 percent last year, according to Damballa. ... [Damballa's] Ollmann says many of the smaller botnets appear to have more knowledge of the targeted organization as well. 'They are very strongly associated with a lot of insider knowledge...and we see a lot of hands-on command and control with these small botnets,' he says. ... Ollmann says botnets of all sizes are also increasingly using more and different types of malware rather than one particular family in order to evade detection. 'Most botnets, even small ones, have hundreds of different pieces of malware and families in use..."
This is the reason traditional antivirus scanning will not work. If the specific malware is only inside your company or a few hundred PC's, there isn't signatures for them either. You have to educate your company's workers and restrict access in OS instead of blindly trusting your antivirus providers.
Now the same approach doesn't work in homes or educating those random users, but it should work inside your company.
This, naturally, compromises other machines on the same network. If another machine on the same network is controlled by hackers, one thing they can do is run a packet sniffer and grab unencrypted passwords. Or read your email (unless you use Gmail and have things set up to always use SSL). Or try to control your computer; it's a lot easier to attack a computer when you're behind the firewall.
The good news is this: Since the computer is a company computer, there's a lot more we can do to find and remove the virus from the computer in question. Such as taking the computer off of the network, making a backup of all data files, and doing a complete reinstall of the OS and all company-approved applications. With or without the computer owner's consent. A corporate IT department has a lot more control over their computers than, say, Comcast.
So the question is this: What are good ways for a corporate IT network to know whether a given computer is a zombie? Analysis of the packets a given computer makes is one way.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
Why do people blame the company for this?
I worked deployment for several years at a company with about 13,000 servers and 96,000 workstations, as well as over 25,000 POS systems. I can safely say that size is not the problem. Policies are the problem. There is always that one employee that thinks that he can sneak iTunes onto the network and download some mp3s to a flash drive despite the "no pen drives policy". Disabling them doesn't really help -- they have physical access to the machine of course.
If you figure that there are 150,000 employees in your company, and the consumer market has a 5% infection rate, and 1% of your employees decide to bring a flash drive in... Then every five days, someone is plugging an infected flash drive into your network. All the network management in the world cannot control that many people -- I can't replicate myself to stand over each user and remind them of the risks. And since they don't see the consequences as they happen, there's no chance for them to learn.
But blaming corporations for this is stupid. And blaming employees for it isn't productive. The truth of the matter is, as far as the business world is concerned -- viruses, worms, malware, spyware, and the like are the cost of doing business. It would cost way more to fix the problem than to simply let it eat at the margins.
Sorry to say, but your data isn't worth those kinds of expenses.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Any good firewall parser then ?
I'm lazy and don't want to read logs or parse them manually...
Anyway It's not even my job (I'm a programmer)! If they're a quick&dirty way to find out I'll try it once a week/month... but I wont read and parse this boring stuff...
I can't call that English
Gotta love the hypocrisy. If a user volunatarily installs malware on their system and get in a botnet and they are Windows it's: "ZOMG TEH WINDOZE IS TEH INSECURE!!!". When a Linux box is part of a botnet due to someone voluntarily installing malware on the system it's: "This isn't proof of Linux not being secure".
While some malware/botnet clients may escape anti-virus detection, the common trait is that they all have to connect to a command and control server. Many IDS products have signatures to detect this type of traffic.
For example, many "botnet-kits" will connect using IRC on a random high port. IRC usage audit signatures are good for detecting the more common botnet c&c traffic.
Prevention is key, but it's still not easy - trying to keep Joe User from playing that Michael Jackson video he got in his email from an unknown sender is quite a challenge.
but, don't packet sniffers grab passwords only on hubs, not the switches that everyone uses nowadays? besides many use google POP3 server, that should be safe(r)?
Whether you make the company money or not, is completely irrelevant. You get PAID to do what you do; you are owed nothing beyond your check and whatever else is listed on your stub, baby.
The fact that you get paid, means that you likely have the means to purchase YOUR OWN laptop, on which to conduct your personal business, but no.......fuck them, right?
The fact is, they CAN have it both ways, not YOU. Most professionals work from a sense of personal pride, and do what they feel is necessary to get the job done, not as barter for perks.
My guess, is that you are probably no where near as successful as you think you are, but if you would like to find out, why not post your screed on your Linked In page, and see how many employers (including your current one) are enamored with your attitude.
Here is a clue; NOBODY successful gives a shit about 60 hours, because they dont count them. They just get things done, and look for more to do.