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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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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.