Botnet Uses Default Passwords To Conduct "Internet Census 2012"

An anonymous reader writes "By using four different login combinations on the default Telnet port (root/root, admin/admin, root/[no password], and admin/[no password]), an anonymous researcher was able to log into (and upload a binary to) 'several hundred thousand unprotected devices' and run 'a super fast distributed port scanner' to scan the enitre IPv4 address space." From the report: "While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage. All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study."

Comments

I can see where this is going

[Daetrin]

Useful research into vulnerabilities, wasn't used for personal gain, was reported to educate others and so security lapses could be fixed.

They're so going to jail.

Re:I can see where this is going

[Anubis IV]

If you're an ethical researcher wanting to run a distributed scan of the 'net, the proper way to do it is to use something like PlanetLab, which has been designed for uses like that and is freely available for research use. It's what everyone else uses, and it works great. Either that, or go and use your grant money to provision yourself appropriately for a job like this, which is what we did when I was in grad school. Commandeering routers and other devices for personal use is inexcusable.

Honestly, my first thought was, "What research ethics committee gave him the go-ahead?" My guess: the researcher didn't ask, because none of them would ever let him do it. Besides consuming bandwidth for tens or hundreds of thousands of Internet users without their consent (some of whom were likely capped), he's also loaded code onto their machines: code which they have no guarantee will work as expected in all circumstances. In fact, for all they know, they may have bricked tens of thousands of devices without realizing they did so, then taken their lack of response later as a simple incompatibility with his code.

When I was in grad school, we were doing web crawler and search engine research that was considered to be a bit on the edge of what was permissible (and our work resulted in serious threats of lawsuits aimed at our university), but we would never consider doing something like what they did. No credible conference or journal would publish this sort of work either, which is as it should be. Researchers have a responsibility to act responsible, and this anonymous one didn't.

Also, you've said it was useful research, but it really wasn't. These vulnerabilities are widely documented, and those researchers were not only able to publish earlier, they were also able to do so without engaging in gross ethical violations.

Re:So this is what?

[Hatta]

The FBI only cares if you embarass a major campaign contributor. e.g. AT&T is the largest campaign contributor in the country, beating out even Goldman Sachs.

Re:Door

[NeutronCowboy]

Man, some people are a paranoid bunch. If someone leaves a flyer on my door that says "You had 2 open windows and one unlocked door", and a similar flyer is on everyone's door, I'll actually thank the good Samaritan. If I see someone looking at doors and windows, taking notes, then putting a flyer on my door, I'll ask him what he's doing, why, and find out what he's actually up to. If he's friendly and forthcoming, I'll thank him and send him on his way. If he's belligerent, then maybe I'll start to consider self-defense.

But to shoot someone just because they are walking around the neighborhood, surveying every house? Yeah, the US doesn't have a gun problem. We have a response problem.

Re:After a reboot ...original state

[malakai]

They didn't force the reboot. So they don't need to calculate for lost uptime.
But they do concede what bandwidth they used and processing time. You could argue they used extra energy, CPU load, and bandwidth, and that equates to money.

What they really got 'lucky' on, is that they didn't code in a fatal flaw and accidentally create something that had a race condition that resulted in distributed DOS to every IP on the network. We've seen things come close to that in the past with worms. I put quotes around lucky, because I think these guys did their homework, and specifically validated their experiment in a limited environment before releasing it.

That said, your test environment is rarely a perfect simulacrum for the real world.

It's a very scary grey hat project. I thought this finding was interesting though:

So, how big is the Internet?
That depends on how you count. 420 Million pingable IPs + 36 Million more that had one or more ports open, making 450 Million that were definitely in use and reachable from the rest of the Internet. 141 Million IPs were firewalled, so they could count as "in use". Together this would be 591 Million used IPs. 729 Million more IPs just had reverse DNS records. If you added those, it would make for a total of 1.3 Billion used IP addresses. The other 2.3 Billion addresses showed no sign of usage.

Based in their rather thorough analysis, only about half the IPV4 address space is being actively used.

I kind of feel this is a little akin to working with scientific research that comes from morally grey or even black experiments...

Another thing to consider about this, is based on the platform they built, they could go for the Black Knight approach, and rescue all the flawed devices without their consent. You could easily see taking this project and saying "How do we patch the devices in a way that causes the least amount of harm, and adds the most amount of security".....

Inoculation can kill though...

Fine line... very fine line. End of the day, these guys hacked and compromised systems with their own binaries, and then used them to compromise other devices. They'd go to jail if they were discovered. Simple truth.

Re:correction

[Lumpy]

After 1 attempt for ROOT I blackhole the ip address for 90 days Nobody should ever try to log in as root, so any login attempt should black hole that IP forever. 3 minutes of script writing is all it takes to do that.

Re:Why are there no counter attacks?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I mean after 30+ years of connected networks there is no such thing as an offensive strike in cyber terrorism?

Because it is a terrible, terrible idea. If automated counter-attacks were to become the norm, then all it would take to start a "war" between two groups is for someone to compromise just one system at the first group and set it to attacking the second group. Think mutual assured destruction except Anonymous has their finger on the button and it's labeled "lulz."