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Many Hackers Accidentally Send Their Code To Microsoft
joshgnosis writes "When hackers crash Windows in the course of developing malware, they'll often accidentally agree to send the virus code straight to Microsoft, according to senior security architect Rocky Heckman. 'It's amazing how much stuff we get.' Heckman also said Microsoft was a common target for people testing their attacks. 'The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com. On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second.'"
Maybe the report includes a dump of working memory?
Just a thought, thought that would make it kind of big.
The Digital Sorceress
An application that generates random gibberish that "look" like a script, then sends it embedded in a fake crash dump to Microsoft for analysis.
"Fuzzing" isn't limited to code on the local machine any more - you can now try it on Microsoft employees.
Then add further fake crash dumps from legitimate apps that didn't crash; enough of them, from enough machines, and Microsoft will be looking for non-existent bugs.
According to TFA Heckman gave a presentation of XSS and SQL injection attacks. So, I imagine that what we're talking about here is Microsoft receiving a dump of IE process memory, which of course will include the malicious script.
If you get a sequence of error reports from the same IP within a short period of time, where the only difference is that the script bringing IE down has been modified slightly, you've probably got the developer at the other end of the line. (Online source control on a budget? ;-)
Where did that come from?
One of the first things I do on a fresh install is turn off error reporting. It has always amazed me that I have never seen a corporate network turn it off. Everyday tons of proprietary information is transmitted to Microsoft in error reports.
Those numbers seem suspiciously inflated. I'm going to guess the majority of these packets are icmp from bots checking ping.
There are what, 1-2 billion people currently on the internet at any one time (probably exceeds that) Let's say 99.9% don't develop malware.
That would put the number of currently active malware developers at 2,000,000. If 10% of them write a program that tries to attack microsoft.com, that's 200,000 programs. If each one of those only tries once every 10 seconds, that could be 20,000 individual programs attacking microsoft.com every second.
Ok, so maybe somewhere those numbers are inflated. Cut it down by another order of 100. That would be 200 unique pieces of malware.
Now the magic: It's not 0.1% of the internet users developing malware that targets microsoft.com. It's 40-60% of the internet users whose computers have been compromised and are attacking microsoft.com.
So 10k attacks per second? Not a stretch at all. These things scale.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Do you really think that Microsoft has a team of people searching through these reports and actively fixing bugs based on them?
Being one of those people (as pretty much any other developer in MS), I definitely think so :)
The system is much more complicated, of course. You can imagine the sheer amount of reports MS is receiving every day (cue the 95 BSOD joke here). Clearly there needs to be some sort of automated processing for it, and there is.
For starters, there are always those folk running the original pristine IE6 on XP SP1 or something, who are hitting bugs that have been fixed ages ago. Obviously you don't want to investigate that, but it's possible to forward people to a webpage explaining the issue and urging to update (typically a KB for a security vuln on TechNet ;).
Then it needs to figure out which reports are dupes of which. For "popular" bugs, you can easily have several thousand people hit it in quick succession. I won't even pretend to know how WER (Windows Error Reporting, which is what the mechanism is called) does that kind of analysis. It looks at the nature of the problem (e.g. segfault, stack cookie corruption etc) and at the call stack, that's for sure, but it goes way beyond that. There is a dedicated team somewhere which works on it, and it's the kind of place where you put the sign "dragons and bearded men in glasses be here". Well, or maybe "SkyNet be here" would be more apt these days. Anyway, by liberal application of pixie dust (from employee's grinded iPhones, the rumor goes!), reports are grouped by specific issues, and the product and area within it is tentatively identified for each.
At that point, it actually lands up in the pile of stuff to do for the team responsible for that area, and stuff goes same as for normal bugs from there - triage, assignment to individual developers, investigation, and (hopefully!) fix.
Now, mind you, I'm not saying that any bug exposed via a WER report is going to be fixed. In fact most probably aren't. The problem is, this kind of post-mortem debugging is hard - oh, it catches stupid mistakes really well (uninitialized pointers, that kind of thing), but those are exceedingly rare in practice. And for more complicated stuff - especially when anything asynchronous is involved - the code that caused the issue can be very far from where the crash actually happens, and all you get from WER is a report at the latter point. Sometimes you can try to look at it and guess the sequence of user actions (and other conditions) that led to this crash, and actually repro it, and then debug live. Sometimes you can carefully put the pieces of the puzzle together to form enough of the picture to pinpoint the code right away. Often, though, you can't really do much given what you have - and, for privacy reasons, we cannot try to contact people who send the reports.
Still, I personally fixed a bunch of issues that came in from WER, so it's a net positive.