Entries Tagged "denial of service"

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World Series Ticket Website Hacked?

Maybe:

The Colorado Rockies will try again to sell World Series tickets through their Web site starting on Tuesday at noon.

Spokesman Jay Alves said tonight that the failure of Monday’s ticket sales happened because the system was brought down today by an “external malicious attack.”

There was a presale that “went well”:

The Colorado Rockies had a chance Sunday to test their online-sales operation in advance.

Season-ticket holders who had previously registered were able to log in with a special password to buy extra tickets.

Alves said the presale went well, with no problems.

But some people found glitches, such as being told to “enable cookies” and to set their computer security to the “lowest level.” And some fans couldn’t log in at all.

Alves explained that those who saw a “page cannot be displayed” message had “IP addresses that we blocked due to suspicious/malicious activity to our website during the last 24 to 48 hours. As an example, if several inquiries came from a single IP address they were blocked.”

Certainly scalpers have an incentive to attack this system.

EDITED TO ADD (10/28): The FBI is investigating.

Posted on October 25, 2007 at 11:52 AM • View Comments

OnStar to Stop Cars Remotely

I’m not sure this is a good idea:

Starting with about 20 models for 2009, the service will be able to slowly halt a car that is reported stolen, and the radio may even speak up and tell the thief to pull over because police are watching.

[…]

Then, if officers see the car in motion and judge it can be stopped safely, they can tell OnStar operators, who will send the car a signal via cell phone to slow it to a halt.

“This technology will basically remove the control of the horsepower from the thief,” Huber said. “Everything else in the vehicle works. The steering works. The brakes work.”

GM is still exploring the possibility of having the car give a recorded verbal warning before it stops moving. A voice would tell the driver through the radio speakers that police will stop the car, Huber said, and the car’s emergency flashers would go on.

Anyone want to take a guess on how soon this system will be hacked?

At least, for now, you can opt out:

Those who want OnStar but don’t like police having the ability to slow down their car can opt out of the service, Huber said. But he said their research shows that 95 percent of subscribers would like that feature.

This is a tough trade-off. Giving the good guys the ability to disable a car, as long as it can be done safely, is a good idea. But giving the bad guys the same ability is a really bad idea. Can we do the former without also doing the latter?

Posted on October 11, 2007 at 1:56 PM • View Comments

Cheap Cell Phone Jammer

Only $166. It’s the size of a cell phone, has a 5-10 meter range, and blocks GSM 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz.

I want one.

Pity they’re illegal to use in the U.S.:

In the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and many other countries, blocking cell-phone services (as well as any other electronic transmissions) is against the law. In the United States, cell-phone jamming is covered under the Communications Act of 1934, which prohibits people from “willfully or maliciously interfering with the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized” to operate. In fact, the “manufacture, importation, sale or offer for sale, including advertising, of devices designed to block or jam wireless transmissions is prohibited” as well.

EDITED TO ADD (10/12): Here’s an even cheaper model. I’ve been told that Deal Extreme ships the unit with a label that says it’s a LED flashlight—with a value of HKD 45—so it will just slip through customs.

EDITED TO ADD (11/6): A video demo.

Posted on October 10, 2007 at 6:38 AM • View Comments

Fraudulent Amber Alerts

Amber Alerts are general notifications in the first few hours after a child has been abducted. The idea is that if you get the word out quickly, you have a better chance of recovering the child.

There’s an interesting social dynamic here, though. If you issue too many of these, the public starts ignoring them. This is doubly true if the alerts turn out to be false.

That’s why two hoax Amber Alerts in September (one in Miami and the other in North Carolina) are a big deal. And it’s a disturbing trend. Here’s data from 2004:

Out of 233 Amber Alerts issued last year, at least 46 were made for children who were lost, had run away or were the subjects of hoaxes and misunderstandings, according to the Scripps Howard study, which used records from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Police also violated federal and state guidelines by issuing dozens of vague alerts with little information upon which the public can act. The study found that 23 alerts were issued last year even though police didn’t know the name of the child who supposedly had been abducted. Twenty-five alerts were issued without complete details about the suspect or a description of the vehicle used in the abduction.

Think of it as a denial-of-service attack against the real world.

Posted on October 5, 2007 at 11:00 AM • View Comments

The Storm Worm

The Storm worm first appeared at the beginning of the year, hiding in e-mail attachments with the subject line: “230 dead as storm batters Europe.” Those who opened the attachment became infected, their computers joining an ever-growing botnet.

Although it’s most commonly called a worm, Storm is really more: a worm, a Trojan horse and a bot all rolled into one. It’s also the most successful example we have of a new breed of worm, and I’ve seen estimates that between 1 million and 50 million computers have been infected worldwide.

Old style worms—Sasser, Slammer, Nimda—were written by hackers looking for fame. They spread as quickly as possible (Slammer infected 75,000 computers in 10 minutes) and garnered a lot of notice in the process. The onslaught made it easier for security experts to detect the attack, but required a quick response by antivirus companies, sysadmins and users hoping to contain it. Think of this type of worm as an infectious disease that shows immediate symptoms.

Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.

Storm represents the future of malware. Let’s look at its behavior:

  1. Storm is patient. A worm that attacks all the time is much easier to detect; a worm that attacks and then shuts off for a while hides much more easily.
  2. Storm is designed like an ant colony, with separation of duties. Only a small fraction of infected hosts spread the worm. A much smaller fraction are C2: command-and-control servers. The rest stand by to receive orders. By only allowing a small number of hosts to propagate the virus and act as command-and-control servers, Storm is resilient against attack. Even if those hosts shut down, the network remains largely intact, and other hosts can take over those duties.
  3. Storm doesn’t cause any damage, or noticeable performance impact, to the hosts. Like a parasite, it needs its host to be intact and healthy for its own survival. This makes it harder to detect, because users and network administrators won’t notice any abnormal behavior most of the time.
  4. Rather than having all hosts communicate to a central server or set of servers, Storm uses a peer-to-peer network for C2. This makes the Storm botnet much harder to disable. The most common way to disable a botnet is to shut down the centralized control point. Storm doesn’t have a centralized control point, and thus can’t be shut down that way.

    This technique has other advantages, too. Companies that monitor net activity can detect traffic anomalies with a centralized C2 point, but distributed C2 doesn’t show up as a spike. Communications are much harder to detect.

    One standard method of tracking root C2 servers is to put an infected host through a memory debugger and figure out where its orders are coming from. This won’t work with Storm: An infected host may only know about a small fraction of infected hosts—25-30 at a time—and those hosts are an unknown number of hops away from the primary C2 servers.

    And even if a C2 node is taken down, the system doesn’t suffer. Like a hydra with many heads, Storm’s C2 structure is distributed.

  5. Not only are the C2 servers distributed, but they also hide behind a constantly changing DNS technique called “fast flux.” So even if a compromised host is isolated and debugged, and a C2 server identified through the cloud, by that time it may no longer be active.
  6. Storm’s payload—the code it uses to spread—morphs every 30 minutes or so, making typical AV (antivirus) and IDS techniques less effective.
  7. Storm’s delivery mechanism also changes regularly. Storm started out as PDF spam, then its programmers started using e-cards and YouTube invites—anything to entice users to click on a phony link. Storm also started posting blog-comment spam, again trying to trick viewers into clicking infected links. While these sorts of things are pretty standard worm tactics, it does highlight how Storm is constantly shifting at all levels.
  8. The Storm e-mail also changes all the time, leveraging social engineering techniques. There are always new subject lines and new enticing text: “A killer at 11, he’s free at 21 and …,” “football tracking program” on NFL opening weekend, and major storm and hurricane warnings. Storm’s programmers are very good at preying on human nature.
  9. Last month, Storm began attacking anti-spam sites focused on identifying it—spamhaus.org, 419eater and so on—and the personal website of Joe Stewart, who published an analysis of Storm. I am reminded of a basic theory of war: Take out your enemy’s reconnaissance. Or a basic theory of urban gangs and some governments: Make sure others know not to mess with you.

Not that we really have any idea how to mess with Storm. Storm has been around for almost a year, and the antivirus companies are pretty much powerless to do anything about it. Inoculating infected machines individually is simply not going to work, and I can’t imagine forcing ISPs to quarantine infected hosts. A quarantine wouldn’t work in any case: Storm’s creators could easily design another worm—and we know that users can’t keep themselves from clicking on enticing attachments and links.

Redesigning the Microsoft Windows operating system would work, but that’s ridiculous to even suggest. Creating a counterworm would make a great piece of fiction, but it’s a really bad idea in real life. We simply don’t know how to stop Storm, except to find the people controlling it and arrest them.

Unfortunately we have no idea who controls Storm, although there’s some speculation that they’re Russian. The programmers are obviously very skilled, and they’re continuing to work on their creation.

Oddly enough, Storm isn’t doing much, so far, except gathering strength. Aside from continuing to infect other Windows machines and attacking particular sites that are attacking it, Storm has only been implicated in some pump-and-dump stock scams. There are rumors that Storm is leased out to other criminal groups. Other than that, nothing.

Personally, I’m worried about what Storm’s creators are planning for Phase II.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD (10/17): Storm is being partitioned, presumably so parts can be sold off. If that’s true, we should expect more malicious activitity out of Storm in the future; anyone buying a botnet will want to use it.

Slashdot thread on Storm.

EDITEDT TO ADD (10/22): Here’s research that suggests Storm is shinking.

EDITED T OADD (10/24): Another article about Storm striking back at security researchers.

Posted on October 4, 2007 at 6:00 AM • View Comments

"Cyberwar" in Estonia

I had been thinking about writing about the massive distributed-denial-of-service attack against the Estonian government last April. It’s been called the first cyberwar, although it is unclear that the Russian government was behind the attacks. And while I’ve written about cyberwar in general, I haven’t really addressed the Estonian attacks.

Now I don’t have to. Kevin Poulsen has written an excellent article on both the reality and the hype surrounding the attacks on Estonia’s networks, commenting on a story in the magazine Wired:

Writer Joshua Davis was dispatched to the smoking ruins of Estonia to assess the damage wrought by last spring’s DDoS attacks against the country’s web, e-mail and DNS servers. Josh is a talented writer, and he returned with a story that offers some genuine insights—a few, though, are likely unintentional.

We see, for example, that Estonia’s computer emergency response team responded to the junk packets with technical aplomb and coolheaded professionalism, while Estonia’s leadership … well, didn’t. Faced with DDoS and nationalistic, cross-border hacktivism—nuisances that have plagued the rest of the wired world for the better part of a decade—Estonia’s leaders lost perspective.

Here’s the best quote, from the speaker of the Estonian parliament, Ene Ergma: “When I look at a nuclear explosion, and the explosion that happened in our country in May, I see the same thing.”

[…]

While cooler heads were combating the first wave of Estonia’s DDoS attacks with packet filters, we learn, the country’s defense minister was contemplating invoking NATO Article 5, which considers an “armed attack” against any NATO country to be an attack against all. That might have obliged the U.S. and other signatories to go to war with Russia, if anyone was silly enough to take it seriously.

Fortunately, nobody important really is that silly. The U.S. has known about DDoS attacks since our own Web War One in 2000, when some our most trafficked sites—Yahoo, Amazon.com, E-Trade, eBay, and CNN.com—were attacked in rapid succession by Canada. (The culprit was a 15-year-old boy in Montreal).

As in Estonia years later, the attack took America’s leaders by surprise. President Clinton summoned some of the United States’ most respected computer security experts to the White House to meet and discuss options for shoring up the internet. At a photo op afterwards, a reporter lobbed Clinton a cyberwar softball: was this the “electronic Pearl Harbor?”

Estonia’s leaders, among others, could learn from the restraint of Clinton’s response. “I think it was an alarm,” he said. “I don’t think it was Pearl Harbor.

“We lost our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted on August 23, 2007 at 1:18 PM • View Comments

Ransomware

Computer security people have been talking about this for years, but only recently are we seeing it in the wild: software that encrypts your data, and then charges you for the decryption key.

PandaLabs points out that this is not the first time such a Trojan has made the rounds, citing PGPCoder as having a “long record on the ransomware scene.” Ransom.A is another Trojan that presented to the user both a shorter time frame and a significantly lower bounty—a file was to be deleted every 30 minutes unless the user paid up the ransom of $10.99. Finally, Arhiveus.A also encrypted user files, but instead of demanding money, instead demanded that the user purchase products from an online drug store.

There appears to be no information available regarding what happens when the user attempts to contact the address in the e-mail or whether the alleged decrypting software actually does the job it’s supposed to do. Gostev places a strong warning on his blog, however, saying that if you find yourself infected with Sinowal.FY, Gpcode.ai, or any other type of ransomware, do not pay up “under any circumstances.” It also doesn’t appear as if there is currently any antivirus solution that can help decrypt the files once they are encrypted, although Gostev says that the Kaspersky Lab team is currently working on a decryption routine.

Posted on July 23, 2007 at 6:08 AM • View Comments

New Trojan Mimics Windows Activation Interface

Clever:

What they are calling Trojan.Kardphisher doesn’t do most of the technical things that Trojan horses usually do; it’s a pure social engineering attack, aimed at stealing credit card information. In a sense, it’s a standalone phishing program.

Once you reboot your PC after running the program, the program asks you to activate your copy of Windows and, while it assures you that you will not be charged, it asks for credit card information. If you don’t enter the credit card information it shuts down the PC. The Trojan also disables Task Manager, making it more difficult to shut down..

Running on the first reboot is clever. It inherently makes the process look more like it’s coming from Windows itself, and it removes the temporal connection to running the Trojan horse. The program even runs on versions of Windows prior to XP, which did not require activation.

More info here.

Posted on May 5, 2007 at 7:59 AM • View Comments

Bot Networks

What could you do if you controlled a network of thousands of computers—or, at least, could use the spare processor cycles on those machines? You could perform massively parallel computations: model nuclear explosions or global weather patterns, factor large numbers or find Mersenne primes, or break cryptographic problems.

All of these are legitimate applications. And you can visit distributed.net and download software that allows you to donate your spare computer cycles to some of these projects. (You can help search for Optimal Golomb Rulers—even if you have no idea what they are.) You’ve got a lot of cycles to spare. There’s no reason that your computer can’t help search for extraterrestrial life as it, for example, sits idly waiting for you to read this essay.

The reason these things work is that they are consensual; none of these projects download software onto your computer without your knowledge. None of these projects control your computer without your consent. But there are lots of software programs that do just that.

The term used for a computer remotely controlled by someone else is a “bot”. A group of computers—thousands or even millions—controlled by someone else is a bot network. Estimates are that millions of computers on the internet today are part of bot networks, and the largest bot networks have over 1.5 million machines.

Initially, bot networks were used for just one thing: denial-of-service attacks. Hackers would use them against each other, fighting hacker feuds in cyberspace by attacking each other’s computers. The first widely publicized use of a distributed intruder tool—technically not a botnet, but practically the same thing—was in February 2000, when Canadian hacker Mafiaboy directed an army of compromised computers to flood CNN.com, Amazon.com, eBay, Dell Computer and other sites with debilitating volumes of traffic. Every newspaper carried that story.

These days, bot networks are more likely to be controlled by criminals than by hackers. The important difference is the motive: profit. Networks are being used to send phishing e-mails and other spam. They’re being used for click fraud. They’re being used as an extortion tool: Pay up or we’ll DDoS you!

Mostly, they’re being used to collect personal data for fraud—commonly called “identity theft.” Modern bot software doesn’t just attack other computers; it attacks its hosts as well. The malware is packed with keystroke loggers to steal passwords and account numbers. In fact, many bots automatically hunt for financial information, and some botnets have been built solely for this purpose—to gather credit card numbers, online banking passwords, PayPal accounts, and so on, from compromised hosts.

Swindlers are also using bot networks for click fraud. Google’s anti-fraud systems are sophisticated enough to detect thousands of clicks by one computer; it’s much harder to determine if a single click by each of thousands of computers is fraud, or just popularity.

And, of course, most bots constantly search for other computers that can be infected and added to the bot network. (A 1.5 million-node bot network was discovered in the Netherlands last year. The command-and-control system was dismantled, but some of the bots are still active, infecting other computers and adding them to this defunct network.)

Modern bot networks are remotely upgradeable, so the operators can add new functionality to the bots at any time, or switch from one bot program to another. Bot authors regularly upgrade their botnets during development, or to evade detection by anti-virus and malware cleanup tools.

One application of bot networks that we haven’t seen all that much of is to launch a fast-spreading worm. (Some believe the Witty worm spread this way.) Much has been written about “flash worms” that can saturate the internet in 15 minutes or less. The situation gets even worse if 10 thousand bots synchronize their watches and release the worm at exactly the same time. Why haven’t we seen more of this? My guess is because there isn’t any profit in it.

There’s no real solution to the botnet problem, because there’s no single problem. There are many different bot networks, controlled in many different ways, consisting of computers infected through many different vulnerabilities. Really, a bot network is nothing more than an attacker taking advantage of 1) one or more software vulnerabilities, and 2) the economies of scale that computer networks bring. It’s the same thing as distributed.net or SETI@home, only the attacker doesn’t ask your permission first.

As long as networked computers have vulnerabilities—and that’ll be for the foreseeable future—there’ll be bot networks. It’s a natural side-effect of a computer network with bugs.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD (7/27): DDOS extortion is a bigger problem than you might think. Right now it’s primarily targeted against fringe industries—online gaming, online gambling, online porn—located offshore, but we’re seeing more and more of against mainstream companies in the U.S. and Europe.

EDITED TO ADD (7/27): Seems that Witty was definitely not seeded from a bot network.

Posted on July 27, 2006 at 6:35 AM • View Comments

Microsoft Windows Kill Switch

Does Microsoft have the ability to disable Windows remotely? Maybe:

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my serious objections to Microsoft’s latest salvo in the war against unauthorized copies of Windows. Two Windows Genuine Advantage components are being pushed onto users’ machines with insufficient notification and inadequate quality control, and the result is a big mess. (For details, see Microsoft presses the Stupid button.)

Guess what? WGA might be on the verge of getting even messier. In fact, one report claims WGA is about to become a Windows “kill switch” ­ and when I asked Microsoft for an on-the-record response, they refused to deny it.

And this, supposedly from someone at Microsoft Support:

He told me that “in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”

The stupidity of this idea is amazing. Not just the inevitability of false positives, but the potential for a hacker to co-opt the controls. I hope this rumor ends up not being true.

Although if they actually do it, the backlash could do more for non-Windows OSs than anything those OSs could do for themselves.

Posted on June 30, 2006 at 11:51 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.