Slashdot Mirror
Zeus Attackers Turned the Tables On Researchers
ancientribe writes "The attackers behind a recent Zeus Trojan exploit that targeted quarterly federal taxpayers who file electronically also set up a trap for researchers investigating the attack as well as their competing cybercrime gangs. They fed them a phony administrative panel with fake statistics on the number of Zeus-infected machines, as well as phony 'botnet' software that actually gathers intelligence on the researcher or competitor who downloads it."
I'm being a bit sardonic here, but why can't we have commercial software that we pay for this well thought out? Of all the categories of software (games, utilities, Office suites), malware has evolved from being CPU/disk/memory hogs to some of the leanest and most well coded executables that ever hit a CPU on the planet.
Come on, who wouldn't have thought of that?
The devious, insidious bastards. It's exactly the sort of thing your average armchair-spamming-fantasist would concoct before decrying that the world is full of idiots and they would make a much better criminal, if only they had the time to learn how to code. I mean, it's creative and ridiculous on a par with bad-scifi plot twists.
A bit scary but, well, I'm impressed.
Meta will eat itself
The lesson is for people (including researchers) to be more skeptical of who is sending you email and what it contains.
If they had realized the email was fake and deleted it, this attack would not have worked.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Because they have an incentive your normal software maufacturer doesnt have. It has to work as supposed to it has to ship.
Give current software companies a reason to code properly and the quality will take a big jump with almost no effort at all. Like, i dont know, any guaranties whatsoever the stuff works?
HTTP/1.1 400
The bad news about botnet operators, malware authors, and other black hats: they aren't stupid.
So, you could call this a researcher honeypot... and apparently these guys got caught with their hand in the honey. Is it really a surprise after this tactic has been used by security researchers for over a decade?
You can't get it because you are unable or unwilling to pay top dollar for quality software that works. By contrast Botnet owners, Wall St firms, and the Chinese government are willing to pay top dollar for software which functions perfectly and reliably and indeed do so.
It should also be noted that when software companies attempt to cross such buyers by providing less than stellar product, they tend to end up regretting it. The average user by contrast keeps buying Windows, Office, Norton and DVD codec software no matter how much they get burned. The incentive to produce quality software for the general user simply doesn't exist.
May the Maths Be with you!
So, you can't trust software from malware vendors?
That's a very good point. Pretty much every piece of software out these days has a EULA declaiming responsibility for anything that happens with the software, up to and including serious financial harm. If your toaster catches fire and destroys something, you would obviously expect the people who made it to be held liable; not so with software. If Communism proved anything it's that if you uncouple effort from reward, people won't go the extra mile (and spend money to get there).
How do you kill that which has no life?
Pretty much every piece of software out these days has a EULA declaiming responsibility for anything that happens with the software, up to and including serious financial harm.
And just like with pretty much every piece of open source software as well?
This isn't really the case. Often we face the situation where we can either not get management to allocate time to fix something, or permission to merge an existing fix into the main branch. A lot of bugs are known and developers want to fix them, but can't.
but why can't we have commercial software that we pay for this well thought out?
What, you think your commercial software isn't covertly tracking you and gathering data on you?
I invite you to look at your TCP connections and all those instances of svchost.exe running on your system... and you never had to click "Allow" to let them communicate over the net.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It has nothing to do with the cost of the software. Extremely expensive enterprise software are often just as crappy as any cheap crap out there, sadly sometimes even worse. The difference is that the expensive software has highly trained personnel supporting it, carefully not doing anything not throughly documented and tested.
Personally im convinced laws demanding responsibility from software firms would benefit them as well as it would put an end to the feature frenzy from the marketing departments. In the end the software would be cheaper to develop and manage, not more expensive.
HTTP/1.1 400
Why don't commercial programs have such high quality and thought out design? Simply because there's not enough money in it. The writers of these programs (the Bad Guys(TM)) make far more money on their work than legit companies do. Plus they have real reasons for being so good: stay out of the gulag. How do you think products like Norton Antivirus got to be such pieces of crap? Make what sells instead of what works. The Bad Guys(TM) have the exact opposite motivation. Make what works, and the money starts coming in. They sell to vulnerable machines and other Bad Guys(TM) and if it doesn't work well, their paycheck doesn't get very big.
In other words, big companies don't need good programming and quality checks. They have marketing departments.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Because those aren't what marketing prioritizes. Generally a company needs to sell the software and get it out it's doors, how well it performs only affects some vague future release. Botnet guys live or die by the performance of their software, they can take the time to get it right and "when it's ready".
So the lesson is, if you want to make quality software that makes you beam with pride, stuff you could put in "Beautiful Code" you ought to be a virus writer. ;)
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
This is where i feel some sort of law should be put in place to put pressure on management. It has to be punished to willfully ship faulty software. Right now its just a PR problem some companies just throw stuff like SDL at (and then just ignore it internally).
HTTP/1.1 400
I invite you to look at your TCP connections and all those instances of svchost.exe running on your system... and you never had to click "Allow" to let them communicate over the net.
And I invite you to use SysInternals’ Process Explorer and find out what those actually are.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
When you name something "Zeus", you gotta be able to plan and code above than normal.
I'm being a bit sardonic here, but why can't we have commercial software that we pay for this well thought out?
What are you talking about? We totally do!
That program that Jim in IT whipped up last night? It doesn't actually calculate the revenue for this quarter, it just displays a pre-made chart when you press the button, thats all. Basically the same thing here.
Yes, but most of the OSS is gratis, so a warranty wouldn't make sense, because there's no sale.
If I were to pay for that OS software, I'd expect a warranty like in any other sale.
Dilbert RSS feed
The OP never stated that he was only talking about closed-source software....
Yes, you understand perfectly.
How do you kill that which has no life?
Like a two year minimum warranty? The EC is looking into that.
Dilbert RSS feed
malware has evolved from being CPU/disk/memory hogs to some of the leanest and most well coded executables
Except for a time in early 2000s when there was a slew of trojans written in Visual Basic and such, malware used to be lean. Don't you remember those 200 byte long viruses from 1980s?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You can usually pay more to have guarantees. Militaries and industries sometimes do that. Are you ready to pay more money (like 2x or 3x) for software ? Arguably Apple does (used to do) a good job in this area.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I thought we agreed to not use the word 'cybercrime' !
This.
Money helps develop good software of course, but it doesn't change the fact that bad software engineering practices lead to bad software. No matter how much money is thrown at it, it won't make your teams do things in a manner close to "the right way."*
* Definitions may vary
Q.E.D.
Find them.
Shoot them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Most "commercial" software must do everything (or multiple things) and by nature are complex. But to your point, what would YOU be willing to pay for, and can you give examples? Everyone likes to pick on MS Office, but I use it at work, and it does a ton of stuff all pretty well. Integration with Outlook and other MS apps is not all that bad considering the scope. But, that's big and complex, and has a UI. You're making a comparison of apples and tomatos.
Forgetting Linux apps completely, I'll pick an app that does fit your criteria... Irfanview. Small, robust, fast, and well worth the price - free. I am sure with a little thought you can come up with some too.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Oh, come on! What kind of hacker, ESPECIALLY the ones who work on the Zeus botnet code, would let a string go unescaped? It's even a login string, and that's step 1 in learning to stop SQL injections. What's more depressing is that the security researchers actually thought they could get in via sql injection. Wow.
You have clearly not reverse engineered malware before.
There is good, well written, well thought out stuff out there. But it is not the norm.
I never saw it that way, being a developer myself, I tend to want to not believe what you say, but the model is appallingly apparent. If we saw money based on if our software works instead of just by selling this greatly packaged piece of crap, you might make windows come down to its knees.
It would be nice to start having a new business model for softwares at the office where the usage is rated based on how many bugs there are, thereby affecting the monthly rate to use the software.
For a simple reason: coding exploits is fiddly, extremely fiddly, and if all the code is constructed using tweezers and needle by an exploitation expert it becomes secure almost automatically?
Emotions! In your brain!
It has nothing to do with the cost of the software. Extremely expensive enterprise software are often just as crappy as any cheap crap out there, sadly sometimes even worse. The difference is that the expensive software has highly trained personnel supporting it, carefully not doing anything not throughly documented and tested.
After watching a "big name" wall street firm experience multiple outages in a new trading system, ultimately bringing it down for DAYS, as the users talked to the OVERSEAS developers I would agree that money paid isn't always an indication of quality.
(the only reason it probably didn't make headlines is that the old system was still in place for redundancy as they ramped up the new one, so from an external perspective nothing happened ... which is as it should be)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Scanning Corporation now, please wait...
Scanning...
Scanning...
There have been 6,553 profit(s) found in your Coporation today! Congratuations!
Click now to give an automatic bonus to the software engineers who work for Corporation!
Note: It is strongly recommended to perform this Scan on a regular basis and by clicking above, you have agreed to perform this Scan every week.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
From the article, it sounds like the honeypot was only discovered after the REAL botnet was pwned. I don't see any claim that it worked. The article says potential targets of the honeypot were researchers and competitors. I suspect the primary target was competitors. The researchers surely know they are likely being monitored and to treat anything they find with suspicion.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
ha, I struck a nerve and some app programmer modded me down.
200 bytes? That was a BIG virus in the 1980s! There were viruses twenty bytes long back then. But of course, all software was a whole lot leaner, by necessity.
Free Martian Whores!
I was expecting you to say that they don't have to pay taxes ;)
There's a reason why the GPL, and indeed most software licenses, include the phrase, "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES". Even in the absence of a sale, there could be an implied warranty. Of course, IANAL so YMMV.
You obviously never lived in Krushchev's USSR.
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
Who the fuck is ap?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I invite people to use SysInternals Process Explorer.
I would never invite anyone to use APK ShitWare Garbage 2000+++ or whatever the hell you call it... unless perhaps they enjoy self-inflicted misery or want to try running it in a VM just to see how bad it really is.
For those who aren’t already familiar with APK (sit down, have the kleenex handy... and don’t complain to me later if your face hurts from laughing so much):
APK - The “Ultimate” Collection - mandatory nighttime reading for Ars (or Slashdot) newbies
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If it works well enough, why fix it? Virus and malware were not doing their job well enough, so someone wrote the better code. It is all quite simple actually.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
Google still says your shitware is a virus.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.