Malware Targeted Against Pro-Tibet Groups
My guess is that it’s the Chinese government.
Entries Tagged "malware"
Page 37 of 47
Physically Hacking Windows Computers via FireWire
This is impressive:
With Winlockpwn, the attacker connects a Linux machine to the Firewire port on the victim’s machine. The attacker then gets full read-and-write memory access and the tool deactivates Windows’s password protection that resides in local memory. Then he or she has carte blanche to steal passwords or drop rootkits and keyloggers onto the machine.
Full disk encryption seems like the only defense here.
Research on Malware Distribution
Among their conclusions are that the majority of malware distribution sites are hosted in China, and that 1.3% of Google searches return at least one link to a malicious site. The lead author, Niels Provos, wrote, ‘It has been over a year and a half since we started to identify web pages that infect vulnerable hosts via drive-by downloads, i.e. web pages that attempt to exploit their visitors by installing and running malware automatically. During that time we have investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 web sites automatically installing malware. During the course of our research, we have investigated not only the prevalence of drive-by downloads but also how users are being exposed to malware and how it is being distributed.'”
Draft paper, and some data.
Benevolent Worms
This is a stupid idea:
Milan Vojnovic and colleagues from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, want to make useful pieces of information such as software updates behave more like computer worms: spreading between computers instead of being downloaded from central servers.
The research may also help defend against malicious types of worm, the researchers say.
Software worms spread by self-replicating. After infecting one computer they probe others to find new hosts. Most existing worms randomly probe computers when looking for new hosts to infect, but that is inefficient, says Vojnovic, because they waste time exploring groups or “subnets” of computers that contain few uninfected hosts.
This idea pops up every few years. This is what I wrote back in 2003, updating something I wrote in 2000:
This is tempting for several reasons. One, it’s poetic: turning a weapon against itself. Two, it lets ethical programmers share in the fun of designing worms. And three, it sounds like a promising technique to solve one of the nastiest online security problems: patching or repairing computers’ vulnerabilities.
Everyone knows that patching is in shambles. Users, especially home users, don’t do it. The best patching techniques involve a lot of negotiation, pleading, and manual labor…things that nobody enjoys very much. Beneficial worms look like a happy solution. You turn a Byzantine social problem into a fun technical problem. You don’t have to convince people to install patches and system updates; you use technology to force them to do what you want.
And that’s exactly why it’s a terrible idea. Patching other people’s machines without annoying them is good; patching other people’s machines without their consent is not. A worm is not “bad” or “good” depending on its payload. Viral propagation mechanisms are inherently bad, and giving them beneficial payloads doesn’t make things better. A worm is no tool for any rational network administrator, regardless of intent.
A good software distribution mechanism has the following characteristics:
- People can choose the options they want.
- Installation is adapted to the host it’s running on.
- It’s easy to stop an installation in progress, or uninstall the software.
- It’s easy to know what has been installed where.
A successful worm, on the other hand, runs without the consent of the user. It has a small amount of code, and once it starts to spread, it is self-propagating, and will keep going automatically until it’s halted.
These characteristics are simply incompatible. Giving the user more choice, making installation flexible and universal, allowing for uninstallation—all of these make worms harder to propagate. Designing a better software distribution mechanism, makes it a worse worm, and vice versa. On the other hand, making the worm quieter and less obvious to the user, making it smaller and easier to propagate, and making it impossible to contain, all make for bad software distribution.
EDITED TO ADD (2/19): This is worth reading on the topic.
EDITED TO ADD (2/19): Microsoft is trying to dispel the rumor that it is working on this technology.
EDITED TO ADD (2/21): Using benevolent worms to test Internet censorship.
EDITED TO ADD (3/13): The benveolent W32.Welchia.Worm, intended to fix Blaster-infected systems, just created havoc.
FBI Knows Identity of Storm Worm Writers
Interesting allegation:
…federal law enforcement officials who need to know have already learned the identities of those responsible for running the Storm worm network, but that U.S. authorities have thus far been prevented from bringing those responsible to justice due to a lack of cooperation from officials in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Storm worm authors are thought to reside.
I’ve written about Storm here.
"Responsible Behavior"
This one is pretty funny, too.
Is Sears Engaging in Criminal Hacking Behavior?
Join “My SHC Community” on Sears.com, and the company will install some pretty impressive spyware on your computer:
Sears.com is distributing spyware that tracks all your Internet usage – including banking logins, email, and all other forms of Internet usage – all in the name of “community participation.” Every website visitor that joins the Sears community installs software that acts as a proxy to every web transaction made on the compromised computer. In other words, if you have installed Sears software (“the proxy”) on your system, all data transmitted to and from your system will be intercepted. This extreme level of user tracking is done with little and inconspicuous notice about the true nature of the software. In fact, while registering to join the “community,” very little mention is made of software or tracking. Furthermore, after the software is installed, there is no indication on the desktop that the proxy exists on the system, so users are tracked silently.
Here is a summary of what the software does and how it is used. The proxy:
- Monitors and transmits a copy of all Internet traffic going from and coming to the compromised system.
- Monitors secure sessions (websites beginning with ‘https’), which may include shopping or banking sites.
- Records and transmits “the pace and style with which you enter information online…”
- Parses the header section of personal emails.
- May combine any data intercepted with additional information like “select credit bureau information” and other sources like “consumer preference reporting companies or credit reporting agencies”.
If a kid with a scary hacker name did this sort of thing, he’d be arrested. But this is Sears, so who knows what will happen to them. But what should happen is that the anti-spyware companies should treat this as the malware it is, and not ignore it because it’s done by a Fortune 500 company.
The Cybercrime Economy
Interesting article:
While standard commercial software vendors sell software as a service, malware vendors sell malware as a service, which is advertised and distributed like standard software. Communicating via internet relay chat (IRC) and forums, hackers advertise Iframe exploits, pop-unders, click fraud, posting and spam. “If you don’t have it, you can rent it here,” boasts one post, which also offers online video tutorials. Prices for services vary by as much as 100-200 percent across sites, while prices for non-Russian sites are often higher: “If you want the discount rate, buy via Russian sites,” says Genes.
In March the price quoted on malware sites for the Gozi Trojan, which steals data and sends it to hackers in an encrypted form, was between $1,000 (£500) and $2,000 for the basic version. Buyers could purchase add-on services at varying prices starting at $20.
This kind of thing is also discussed here.
The Nugache Worm/Botnet
I’ve already written about the Storm worm, and how it represents a new generation of worm/botnets. And Scott Berinato has written an excellent article about the Gozi worm, another new-generation worm/botnet.
This article is about yet another new-generation worm-botnet: Nugache. Dave Dittrich thinks this is the most advanced worm/botnet yet:
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.
[…]
Nugache, and its more famous cousin, the Storm Trojan, are not simply the next step in the evolution of malware. They represent a major step forward in both the quality of software that malware authors are producing and in the sophistication of their tactics. Although they’re often referred to as worms, Storm and Nugache are actually Trojans. The Storm creator, for example, sends out millions of spam messages on a semi-regular basis, each containing a link to content on some remote server, normally disguised in a fake pitch for a penny stock, Viagra or relief for victims of a recent natural disaster. When a user clicks on the link, the attacker’s server installs the Storm Trojan on the user’s PC and it’s off and running.
Various worms, viruses, bots and Trojans over the years have had one or two of the features that Storm, Nugache, Rbot and other such programs possess, but none has approached the breadth and depth of their feature sets. Rbot, for example, has more than 100 features that users can choose from when compiling the bot. This means that two different bots compiled from an identical source could have nearly identical feature sets, yet look completely different to an antivirus engine.
[…]
As scary as Storm and Nugache are, the scarier thing is that they represent just the tip of the iceberg. Experts say that there are several malware groups out there right now that are writing custom Trojans, rootkits and attack toolkits to the specifications of their customers. The customers are in turn using the malware not to build worldwide botnets a la Storm, but to attack small slices of a certain industry, such as financial services or health care.
Rizo, a variant of the venerable Rbot, is the poster child for this kind of attack. A Trojan in the style of Nugache and Storm, Rizo has been modified a number of times to meet the requirements of various different attack scenarios. Within the course of a few weeks, different versions of Rizo were used to attack customers of several different banks in South America. Once installed on a user’s PC, it monitors Internet activity and gathers login credentials for online banking sites, which it then sends back to the attacker. It’s standard behavior for these kinds of Trojans, but the amount of specificity and customization involved in the code and the ways in which the author changed it over time are what have researchers worried.
[…]
“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.”
See also: “Command and control structures in malware: From Handler/Agent to P2P,” by Dave Dittrich and Sven Dietrich, USENIX ;login:, vol. 32, no. 6, December 2007, and “Analysis of the Storm and Nugache Trojans: P2P is here,” Sam Stover, Dave Dittrich, John Hernandez, and Sven Dietrich, USENIX ;login:, vol. 32, no. 6, December 2007. The second link is available to USENIX members only, unfortunately.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.