bots

A botnet with a contingency plan

business, law, security, tech in changing society / /

From Gregg Keizer’s “Massive botnet returns from the dead, starts spamming” (Computerworld: 26 November 2008):

A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals.

The “Srizbi” botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye Inc., when the infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, which are now based in Estonia.

Srizbi was knocked out more than two weeks ago when McColo Corp., a hosting company that had been accused of harboring a wide range of criminal activities, was yanked off the Internet by its upstream service providers. With McColo down, PCs infected with Srizbi and other bot Trojan horses were unable to communicate with their command servers, which had been hosted by McColo. As a result, spam levels dropped precipitously.

But as other researchers noted last week, Srizbi had a fallback strategy. In the end, that strategy paid off for the criminals who control the botnet.

According to Gong, when Srizbi bots were unable to connect with the command-and-control servers hosted by McColo, they tried to connect with new servers via domains that were generated on the fly by an internal algorithm. FireEye reverse-engineered Srizbi, rooted out that algorithm and used it to predict, then preemptively register, several hundred of the possible routing domains.

The domain names, said Gong, were generated on a three-day cycle, and for a while, FireEye was able to keep up — and effectively block Srizbi’s handlers from regaining control.

“We have registered a couple hundred domains,” Gong said, “but we made the decision that we cannot afford to spend so much money to keep registering so many [domain] names.”

Once FireEye stopped preempting Srizbi’s makers, the latter swooped in and registered the five domains in the next cycle. Those domains, in turn, pointed Srizbi bots to the new command-and-control servers, which then immediately updated the infected machines to a new version of the malware.

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The purpose of the Storm botnet? To send spam

business, security, tech in changing society / /

From Tim Wilson’s “Researchers Link Storm Botnet to Illegal Pharmaceutical Sales” (DarkReading: 11 June 2008):

“Our previous research revealed an extremely sophisticated supply chain behind the illegal pharmacy products shipped after orders were placed on botnet-spammed Canadian pharmacy Websites. But the relationship between the technology-focused botnet masters and the global supply chain organizations was murky until now,” said Patrick Peterson, vice president of technology at IronPort and a Cisco fellow.

“Our research has revealed a smoking gun that shows that Storm and other botnet spam generates commissionable orders, which are then fulfilled by the supply chains, generating revenue in excess of $150 million per year.”

In fact, the “Canadian Pharmacy” Website, which many Storm emails promote, is estimated to have sales of $150 million per year by itself, the report says. The site offers a customer service phone number that goes into voice mail and buyers usually do receive the drugs — but the shipments include counterfeit pharmaceuticals from China and India, rather than brand-name drugs from Canada, IronPort says.

IronPort’s research revealed that more than 80 percent of Storm botnet spam advertises online pharmacy brands. This spam is sent by millions of consumers’ PCs, which have been infected by the Storm worm via a multitude of sophisticated social engineering tricks and Web-based exploits. Further investigation revealed that spam templates, “spamvertized” URLs, Website designs, credit card processing, product fulfillment, and customer support were being provided by a Russian criminal organization that operates in conjunction with Storm, IronPort says.

…

However, IronPort-sponsored pharmacological testing revealed that two thirds of the shipments contained the active ingredient but were not the correct dosage, while the others were placebos.

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How movies are moved around on botnets

business, law, security, tech in changing society / /

From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):

Figure 2.11 illustrates the use of botnets for selling stolen intellectual property, in this case Movies, TV shows, or video. The diagram is based on information from the Pyramid of Internet Piracy created by Motion Picture Arts Association (MPAA) and an actual case. To start the process, a supplier rips a movie or software from an existing DVD or uses a camcorder to record a first run movie in the theaters. These are either burnt to DVDs to be sold on the black market or they are sold or provided to a Release Group. The Release Group is likely to be an organized crime group, excuse me, business associates who wish to invest in the entertainment industry. I am speculating that the Release Group engages (hires) a botnet operator that can meet their delivery and performance specifications. The botherder then commands the botnet clients to retrieve the media from the supplier and store it in a participating botnet client. These botnet clients may be qualified according to the system processor speed and the nature of the Internet connection. The huge Internet pipe, fast connection, and lax security at most universities make them a prime target for this form of botnet application. MPAA calls these clusters of high speed locations “Topsites.”

. . .

According to the MPAA, 44 percent of all movie piracy is attributed to college students. Therefore it makes sense that the Release Groups would try to use university botnet clients as Topsites. The next groups in the chain are called Facilitators. They operate Web sites and search engines and act as Internet directories. These may be Web sites for which you pay a monthly fee or a fee per download. Finally individuals download the films for their own use or they list them via Peer-to-Peer sharing applications like Gnutella, BitTorrent for download.

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1st criminal case involving a botnet

law, security / /

From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):

The first criminal case involving a botnet went to trial in November 2005. Jeanson James Ancheta (a. k. a. Resili3nt), age 21, of Downey, California, was convicted and sentenced to five years in jail for conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, conspiring to violate the CAN-SPAM Act, causing damage to computers used by the federal government in national defense, and accessing protected computers without authorization to commit fraud.

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Usernames that botnets try

security / /

From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):

Default UserIDs Tried by RBot

Here is a list of default userids that RBot uses.

  • Administrator
  • Administrador
  • Administrateur
  • administrat
  • admins
  • admin
  • staff
  • root
  • computer
  • owner
  • student
  • teacher
  • wwwadmin
  • guest
  • default
  • database
  • dba
  • oracle
  • db2

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The life cycle of a botnet client

security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):

What makes a botnet a botnet? In particular, how do you distinguish a botnet client from just another hacker break-in? First, the clients in a botnet must be able to take actions on the client without the hacker having to log into the client’s operating system (Windows, UNIX, or Mac OS). Second, many clients must be able to act in a coordinated fashion to accomplish a common goal with little or no intervention from the hacker. If a collection of computers meet this criteria it is a botnet.

…

The life of a botnet client, or botclient, begins when it has been exploited. A prospective botclient can be exploited via malicious code that a user is tricked into running; attacks against unpatched vulnerabilities; backdoors left by Trojan worms or remote access Trojans; and password guessing and brute force access attempts. In this section we’ll discuss each of these methods of exploiting botnets.

…

Rallying and Securing the Botnet Client

Although the order in the life cycle may vary, at some point early in the life of a new botnet client it must call home, a process called “rallying. “When rallying, the botnet client initiates contact with the botnet Command and Control (C&C) Server. Currently, most botnets use IRC for Command and Control.

…

Rallying is the term given for the first time a botnet client logins in to a C&C server. The login may use some form of encryption or authentication to limit the ability of others to eavesdrop on the communications. Some botnets are beginning to encrypt the communicated data.

At this point the new botnet client may request updates. The updates could be updated exploit software, an updated list of C&C server names, IP addresses, and/or channel names. This will assure that the botnet client can be managed and can be recovered should the current C&C server be taken offline.

The next order of business is to secure the new client from removal. The client can request location of the latest anti-antivirus (Anti-A/V) tool from the C&C server. The newly controlled botclient would download this soft- ware and execute it to remove the A/V tool, hide from it, or render it ineffective.

…

Shutting off the A/V tool may raise suspicions if the user is observant. Some botclients will run a dll that neuters the A/V tool. With an Anti-A/V dll in place the A/V tool may appear to be working normally except that it never detects or reports the files related to the botnet client. It may also change the Hosts file and LMHosts file so that attempts to contact an A/V vendor for updates will not succeed. Using this method, attempts to contact an A/V vendor can be redirected to a site containing malicious code or can yield a “website or server not found” error.

One tool, hidden32. exe, is used to hide applications that have a GUI interface from the user. Its use is simple; the botherder creates a batch file that executes hidden32 with the name of the executable to be hidden as its parameter. Another stealthy tool, HideUserv2, adds an invisible user to the administrator group.

…

Waiting for Orders and Retrieving the Payload

Once secured, the botnet client will listen to the C&C communications channel.

…

The botnet client will then request the associated payload. The payload is the term I give the software representing the intended function of this botnet client.

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Details on the Storm & Nugache botnets

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Dennis Fisher’s “Storm, Nugache lead dangerous new botnet barrage” (SearchSecurity.com: 19 December 2007):

[Dave Dittrich, a senior security engineer and researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle], one of the top botnet researchers in the world, has been tracking botnets for close to a decade and has seen it all. But this new piece of malware, which came to be known as Nugache, was a game-changer. With no C&C server to target, bots capable of sending encrypted packets and the possibility of any peer on the network suddenly becoming the de facto leader of the botnet, Nugache, Dittrich knew, would be virtually impossible to stop.

…

Dittrich and other researchers say that when they analyze the code these malware authors are putting out, what emerges is a picture of a group of skilled, professional software developers learning from their mistakes, improving their code on a weekly basis and making a lot of money in the process.

…

The way that Storm, Nugache and other similar programs make money for their creators is typically twofold. First and foremost, Storm’s creator controls a massive botnet that he can use to send out spam runs, either for himself or for third parties who pay for the service. Storm-infected PCs have been sending out various spam messages, including pump-and-dump stock scams, pitches for fake medications and highly targeted phishing messages, throughout 2007, and by some estimates were responsible for more than 75% of the spam on the Internet at certain points this year.

Secondly, experts say that Storm’s author has taken to sectioning off his botnet into smaller pieces and then renting those subnets out to other attackers. Estimates of the size of the Storm network have ranged as high as 50 million PCs, but Brandon Enright, a network security analyst at the University of California at San Diego, who wrote a tool called Stormdrain to locate and count infect machines, put the number at closer to 20,000. Dittrich estimates that the size of the Nugache network was roughly equivalent to Enright’s estimates for Storm.

…

“The Storm network has a team of very smart people behind it. They change it constantly. When the attacks against searching started to be successful, they completely changed how commands are distributed in the network,” said Enright. “If AV adapts, they re-adapt. If attacks by researchers adapt, they re-adapt. If someone tries to DoS their distribution system, they DoS back.”

…

The other worrisome detail in all of this is that there’s significant evidence that the authors of these various pieces of malware are sharing information and techniques, if not collaborating outright.

“I’m pretty sure that there are tactics being shared between the Nugache and Storm authors,” Dittrich said. “There’s a direct lineage from Sdbot to Rbot to Mytob to Bancos. These guys can just sell the Web front-end to these things and the customers can pick their options and then just hit go.”

Once just a hobby for devious hackers, writing malware is now a profession and its products have helped create a global shadow economy. That infrastructure stretches from the mob-controlled streets of Moscow to the back alleys of Malaysia to the office parks of Silicon Valley. In that regard, Storm, Nugache and the rest are really just the first products off the assembly line, the Model Ts of P2P malware.

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1/2 of all bots are in China

law, security / /

From “Report: China’s botnet problems grows” (SecurityFocus: 21 April 2008):

Computers infected by Trojan horse programs and bot software are the greatest threat to China’s portion of the Internet, with compromises growing more than 20-fold in the past year, the nation’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CN-CERT) stated in its 2007 annual report released last week.

The response organization found that the number of Chinese Internet addresses with one or more infected systems increased by a factor of 22 in 2007. The report, currently only published in Chinese, estimates that, of 6.23 million bot-infected computers on the Internet, about 3.62 million are in China’s address space.

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Bots on campus!

education, security / /

From Lisa Vaas’ “Are Campuses Flooded with Zombified Student PCs?” (eWeek: 22 October 2007):

Rather, bot herders have sophisticated technology in place that can detect how fast a bot’s connection is. If that connection changes over time – if, say, a student is poking around at her parent’s house with dial-up all summer and then comes back to school and the campus network’s zippy broadband – the herder detects the increased bandwidth, and that zombie PC suddenly becomes a much more useful tool for sending spam or engaging in other nefarious activities, as pointed out by SecureWorks Director of Development Wayne Haber …

“The more significant factor is to take a machine that was the only system, or one of two to three, on a home network, and to move it to an environment of hundreds or thousands of machines on a network in different states of being patched and of running security software,” [Craig Schmugar, threat research manager for McAfee’s Avert Labs] said. “The new students coming in, there’s a greater chance of having new computers, and those might not have firewalls. It’s a more diverse network environment, with a greater opportunity for machines to be attacked. Maybe not successfully, but at least there’s more traffic thrown at machines.”

Another helpful thing about campuses, of course, is that they have loads of systems left on around the clock in their labs. Universities also have the added stickiness of trying to administer security policies for a constantly shifting population, with visiting scholars coming and going and a variable range of access rights necessary for staff and students.

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