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Dutch Police Takedown C&Cs Used By Grum Botnet
wiredmikey writes "Dutch authorities have pulled the plug on two secondary servers used by the Grum botnet, a large botnet said to produce about 17% of the world's spam. According to researchers from FireEye, the backup C&C servers were located in the Netherlands, and once word of their existence was released, Dutch authorities quickly seized them. While any C&C server takedown is a win, the impact may be minimal, as the two primary servers are fully active, and the datacenters hosting them are unresponsive to fully documented abuse reports. That being said, FireEye's Atif Mushtaq noted that the botnet does has some weak spots, including the fact that Grum has no failback mechanism, has just a few IPs hardcoded into the binaries, and the botnet is divided into small segments, so even if some C&Cs are not taken down, part of botnet can still remain offline. The removal of the C&C servers shines light on how quickly some law enforcement agencies work, given that proof of their existence is just over a week old."
The quality of first post trolls has really decreased in the last few years.
I had to look up "C&C" (for those who don't know, it stands for "Command and Control"). It's easy for me to blame the editors, submitter, etc, for necessitating this, but then again, it took just seconds to look it up. Still, it's a nuisance, and honestly in the end I think it's an art on the part of the editors/submitter to know whether or not explaining them is necessary. So, for what it's worth, as far as I'm concerned: FAILURE!
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I'm surprised there's not more voluntary cooperation among ISPs to blackhole unresponsive datacenters hosting botnet command infrasturcture.
Is the money for hosting that kind of stuff that good, or is it one of those semi-political things where those data centers are in a country like Russia where the difference between organized crime and the government depends on what time of day it is?
The submitter's grammar 'does has' some weak spots.
Silence is a state of mime.
Ugh. The flip side of this is that the ISPs in question will be bogged down by a million calls from 75 year old grandparents who can't check their grandkids' Facebook pages for pictures of the family BBQ, and trying to talk them through it. In essence, the ISP becomes free (but encumbered) technical support, trying to talk nontechnical people through virus/trojan removal over the phone, with the cost of failure being a cancelled account ("since you guys won't let me go online").
1. Announce the C&C server IPs to the world.
2. Watch Anonymous DDoS them so hard the host will have to choice but to kick them to protect the rest of their datacenter.
And the best part is that the operators of the servers have no legal recourse at all, because that would mean revealing their identities.
1. You've missed the point: it will work for "two weeks", as in, only until the spammers find some other method or workaround.
2. It's packet filtering (a firewall dropping all packets).
3. Yay, more laws! Let's just ignore the places where it will directly contradict existing laws.
4. Because the non-solution doesn't stop spam via. open relays.
6. Profit is a motivation for finding workaround or other methods.
8. Oh, your University did it so it must be a great idea for the entire Internet? Gotcha.
9. You are again missing the point.
10. Yes it is.
11. I do not trust my ISP to not fuck up something as complex as detecting a remote malware infected server and firewalling it effectively.
In short: you're wrong.
From the article:
"In my opinion, taking down the top three spam botnets—Lethic, Cutwail, and Grum—is enough for a rapid and permanent decline in worldwide spam level," he said. "We still have to deal with small players, but I am sure that, after seeing the big players being knocked down, they will retreat as well."
Very optimistic! There's too many colo/virtual host sites out there that simply don't give a rat's ass that large swaths of their
bandwidth and IP space are being used by spammers. They're everywhere! And I've given up telling them. Even "legit" ISPs
like Integra have routinely ignored my notices in the past, so I've simply given up, I haven't the time or inclination to help any
more. They're using spammers to help pad their bottom line.
Reduced, sure, but go away? And another big botnet will appear again in the future, I have no doubt at all.