Entries Tagged "malware"

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Attack Trends: 2004 and 2005

Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., monitors more than 450 networks in 35 countries, in every time zone. In 2004 we saw 523 billion network events, and our analysts investigated 648,000 security “tickets.” What follows is an overview of what’s happening on the Internet right now, and what we expect to happen in the coming months.

In 2004, 41 percent of the attacks we saw were unauthorized activity of some kind, 21 percent were scanning, 26 percent were unauthorized access, 9 percent were DoS (denial of service), and 3 percent were misuse of applications.

Over the past few months, the two attack vectors that we saw in volume were against the Windows DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) interface of the RPC (remote procedure call) service and against the Windows LSASS (Local Security Authority Subsystem Service). These seem to be the current favorites for virus and worm writers, and we expect this trend to continue.

The virus trend doesn’t look good. In the last six months of 2004, we saw a plethora of attacks based on browser vulnerabilities (such as GDI-JPEG image vulnerability and IFRAME) and an increase in sophisticated worm and virus attacks. More than 1,000 new worms and viruses were discovered in the last six months alone.

In 2005, we expect to see ever-more-complex worms and viruses in the wild, incorporating complex behavior: polymorphic worms, metamorphic worms, and worms that make use of entry-point obscuration. For example, SpyBot.KEG is a sophisticated vulnerability assessment worm that reports discovered vulnerabilities back to the author via IRC channels.

We expect to see more blended threats: exploit code that combines malicious code with vulnerabilities in order to launch an attack. We expect Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services) Web server to continue to be an attractive target. As more and more companies migrate to Windows 2003 and IIS 6, however, we expect attacks against IIS to decrease.

We also expect to see peer-to-peer networking as a vector to launch viruses.

Targeted worms are another trend we’re starting to see. Recently there have been worms that use third-party information-gathering techniques, such as Google, for advanced reconnaissance. This leads to a more intelligent propagation methodology; instead of propagating scattershot, these worms are focusing on specific targets. By identifying targets through third-party information gathering, the worms reduce the noise they would normally make when randomly selecting targets, thus increasing the window of opportunity between release and first detection.

Another 2004 trend that we expect to continue in 2005 is crime. Hacking has moved from a hobbyist pursuit with a goal of notoriety to a criminal pursuit with a goal of money. Hackers can sell unknown vulnerabilities—”zero-day exploits”—on the black market to criminals who use them to break into computers. Hackers with networks of hacked machines can make money by selling them to spammers or phishers. They can use them to attack networks. We have started seeing criminal extortion over the Internet: hackers with networks of hacked machines threatening to launch DoS attacks against companies. Most of these attacks are against fringe industries—online gambling, online computer gaming, online pornography—and against offshore networks. The more these extortions are successful, the more emboldened the criminals will become.

We expect to see more attacks against financial institutions, as criminals look for new ways to commit fraud. We also expect to see more insider attacks with a criminal profit motive. Already most of the targeted attacks—as opposed to attacks of opportunity—originate from inside the attacked organization’s network.

We also expect to see more politically motivated hacking, whether against countries, companies in “political” industries (petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc.), or political organizations. Although we don’t expect to see terrorism occur over the Internet, we do expect to see more nuisance attacks by hackers who have political motivations.

The Internet is still a dangerous place, but we don’t foresee people or companies abandoning it. The economic and social reasons for using the Internet are still far too compelling.

This essay originally appeared in the June 2005 issue of Queue.

Posted on June 6, 2005 at 1:02 PM • View Comments

Major Israeli Computer Espionage Case

This is a fascinating story of computer espionage.

Dozens of leading companies and top private investigators were named yesterday as suspects in a massive industrial espionage investigation that local police have been conducting for the past six months.

The companies suspected of commissioning the espionage, which was carried out by planting Trojan horse software in their competitors’ computers, include the satellite television company Yes, which is suspected of spying on cable television company HOT; cell-phone companies Pelephone and Cellcom, suspected of spying on their mutual rival Partner; and Mayer, which imports Volvos and Hondas to Israel and is suspected of spying on Champion Motors, importer of Audis and Volkswagens. Spy programs were also located in the computers of major companies such as Strauss-Elite, Shekem Electric and the business daily Globes.

Read the whole story; it’s filled with interesting details. To me, the most interesting is that even though the Trojan was installed on computers at dozens of Israel’s top companies, it was discovered only because the Trojan writer also used it to spy after his ex-in-laws.

There’s a lesson here for all computer criminals.

Edited to add: Much more information here.

Posted on May 31, 2005 at 7:17 AM • View Comments

Holding Computer Files Hostage

This one has been predicted for years. Someone breaks into your network, encrypts your data files, and then demands a ransom to hand over the key.

I don’t know how the attackers did it, but below is probably the best way. A worm could be programmed to do it.

1. Break into a computer.

2. Generate a random 256-bit file-encryption key.

3. Encrypt the file-encryption key with a common RSA public key.

4. Encrypt data files with the file-encryption key.

5. Wipe data files and file-encryption key.

6. Wipe all free space on the drive.

7. Output a file containing the RSA-encrypted, file encryption key.

8. Demand ransom.

9. Receive ransom.

10. Receive encrypted file-encryption key.

11. Decrypt it and send it back.

In any situation like this, step 9 is the hardest. It’s where you’re most likely to get caught. I don’t know much about anonymous money transfer, but I don’t think Swiss bank accounts have the anonymity they used to.

You also might have to prove that you can decrypt the data, so an easy modification is to encrypt a piece of the data with another file-encryption key so you can prove to the victim that you have the RSA private key.

Internet attacks have changed over the last couple of years. They’re no longer about hackers. They’re about criminals. And we should expect to see more of this sort of thing in the future.

Posted on May 30, 2005 at 8:18 AM • View Comments

Fearmongering About Bot Networks

Bot networks are a serious security problem, but this is ridiculous. From the Independent:

The PC in your home could be part of a complex international terrorist network. Without you realising it, your computer could be helping to launder millions of pounds, attacking companies’ websites or cracking confidential government codes.

This is not the stuff of science fiction or a conspiracy theory from a paranoid mind, but a warning from one of the world’s most-respected experts on computer crime. Dr Peter Tippett is chief technology officer at Cybertrust, a US computer security company, and a senior adviser on the issue to President George Bush. His warning is stark: criminals and terrorists are hijacking home PCs over the internet, creating “bot” computers to carry out illegal activities.

Yes, bot networks are bad. They’re used to send spam (both commercial and phishing), launch denial-of-service attacks (sometimes involving extortion), and stage attacks on other systems. Most bot networks are controlled by kids, but more and more criminals are getting into the act.

But your computer a part of an international terrorist network? Get real.

Once a criminal has gathered together what is known as a “herd” of bots, the combined computing power can be dangerous. “If you want to break the nuclear launch code then set a million computers to work on it. There is now a danger of nation state attacks,” says Dr Tippett. “The vast majority of terrorist organisations will use bots.”

I keep reading that last sentence, and wonder if “bots” is just a typo for “bombs.” And the line about bot networks being used to crack nuclear launch codes is nothing more than fearmongering.

Clearly I need to write an essay on bot networks.

Posted on May 17, 2005 at 3:33 PM • View Comments

The Potential for an SSH Worm

SSH, or secure shell, is the standard protocol for remotely accessing UNIX systems. It’s used everywhere: universities, laboratories, and corporations (particularly in data-intensive back office services). Thanks to SSH, administrators can stack hundreds of computers close together into air-conditioned rooms and administer them from the comfort of their desks.

When a user’s SSH client first establishes a connection to a remote server, it stores the name of the server and its public key in a known_hosts database. This database of names and keys allows the client to more easily identify the server in the future.

There are risks to this database, though. If an attacker compromises the user’s account, the database can be used as a hit-list of follow-on targets. And if the attacker knows the username, password, and key credentials of the user, these follow-on targets are likely to accept them as well.

A new paper from MIT explores the potential for a worm to use this infection mechanism to propagate across the Internet. Already attackers are exploiting this database after cracking passwords. The paper also warns that a worm that spreads via SSH is likely to evade detection by the bulk of techniques currently coming out of the worm detection community.

While a worm of this type has not been seen since the first Internet worm of 1988, attacks have been growing in sophistication and most of the tools required are already in use by attackers. It’s only a matter of time before someone writes a worm like this.

One of the countermeasures proposed in the paper is to store hashes of host names in the database, rather than the names themselves. This is similar to the way hashes of passwords are stored in password databases, so that security need not rely entirely on the secrecy of the database.

The authors of the paper have worked with the open source community, and version 4.0 of OpenSSH has the option of hashing the known-hosts database. There is also a patch for OpenSSH 3.9 that does the same thing.

The authors are also looking for more data to judge the extent of the problem. Details about the research, the patch, data collection, and whatever else thay have going on can be found here.

Posted on May 10, 2005 at 9:06 AM • View Comments

The Failure of Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication isn’t our savior. It won’t defend against phishing. It’s not going to prevent identity theft. It’s not going to secure online accounts from fraudulent transactions. It solves the security problems we had ten years ago, not the security problems we have today.

The problem with passwords is that they’re too easy to lose control of. People give them to other people. People write them down, and other people read them. People send them in e-mail, and that e-mail is intercepted. People use them to log into remote servers, and their communications are eavesdropped on. They’re also easy to guess. And once any of that happens, the password no longer works as an authentication token because you can’t be sure who is typing that password in.

Two-factor authentication mitigates this problem. If your password includes a number that changes every minute, or a unique reply to a random challenge, then it’s harder for someone else to intercept. You can’t write down the ever-changing part. An intercepted password won’t be good the next time it’s needed. And a two-factor password is harder to guess. Sure, someone can always give his password and token to his secretary, but no solution is foolproof.

These tokens have been around for at least two decades, but it’s only recently that they have gotten mass-market attention. AOL is rolling them out. Some banks are issuing them to customers, and even more are talking about doing it. It seems that corporations are finally waking up to the fact that passwords don’t provide adequate security, and are hoping that two-factor authentication will fix their problems.

Unfortunately, the nature of attacks has changed over those two decades. Back then, the threats were all passive: eavesdropping and offline password guessing. Today, the threats are more active: phishing and Trojan horses.

Here are two new active attacks we’re starting to see:

  • Man-in-the-Middle attack. An attacker puts up a fake bank website and entices user to that website. User types in his password, and the attacker in turn uses it to access the bank’s real website. Done right, the user will never realize that he isn’t at the bank’s website. Then the attacker either disconnects the user and makes any fraudulent transactions he wants, or passes along the user’s banking transactions while making his own transactions at the same time.

  • Trojan attack. Attacker gets Trojan installed on user’s computer. When user logs into his bank’s website, the attacker piggybacks on that session via the Trojan to make any fraudulent transaction he wants.

See how two-factor authentication doesn’t solve anything? In the first case, the attacker can pass the ever-changing part of the password to the bank along with the never-changing part. And in the second case, the attacker is relying on the user to log in.

The real threat is fraud due to impersonation, and the tactics of impersonation will change in response to the defenses. Two-factor authentication will force criminals to modify their tactics, that’s all.

Recently I’ve seen examples of two-factor authentication using two different communications paths: call it “two-channel authentication.” One bank sends a challenge to the user’s cell phone via SMS and expects a reply via SMS. If you assume that all your customers have cell phones, then this results in a two-factor authentication process without extra hardware. And even better, the second authentication piece goes over a different communications channel than the first; eavesdropping is much, much harder.

But in this new world of active attacks, no one cares. An attacker using a man-in-the-middle attack is happy to have the user deal with the SMS portion of the log-in, since he can’t do it himself. And a Trojan attacker doesn’t care, because he’s relying on the user to log in anyway.

Two-factor authentication is not useless. It works for local login, and it works within some corporate networks. But it won’t work for remote authentication over the Internet. I predict that banks and other financial institutions will spend millions outfitting their users with two-factor authentication tokens. Early adopters of this technology may very well experience a significant drop in fraud for a while as attackers move to easier targets, but in the end there will be a negligible drop in the amount of fraud and identity theft.

This essay will appear in the April issue of Communications of the ACM.

Posted on March 15, 2005 at 7:54 AM • View Comments

Tracking Bot Networks

This is a fascinating piece of research on bot networks: networks of compromised computers that can be remotely controlled by an attacker. The paper details how bots and bot networks work, who uses them, how they are used, and how to track them.

From the conclusion:

In this paper we have attempted to demonstrate how honeynets can help us understand how botnets work, the threat they pose, and how attackers control them. Our research shows that some attackers are highly skilled and organized, potentially belonging to well organized crime structures. Leveraging the power of several thousand bots, it is viable to take down almost any website or network instantly. Even in unskilled hands, it should be obvious that botnets are a loaded and powerful weapon. Since botnets pose such a powerful threat, we need a variety of mechanisms to counter it.

Decentralized providers like Akamai can offer some redundancy here, but very large botnets can also pose a severe threat even against this redundancy. Taking down of Akamai would impact very large organizations and companies, a presumably high value target for certain organizations or individuals. We are currently not aware of any botnet usage to harm military or government institutions, but time will tell if this persists.

In the future, we hope to develop more advanced honeypots that help us to gather information about threats such as botnets. Examples include Client honeypots that actively participate in networks (e.g. by crawling the web, idling in IRC channels, or using P2P-networks) or modify honeypots so that they capture malware and send it to anti-virus vendors for further analysis. As threats continue to adapt and change, so must the security community.

Posted on March 14, 2005 at 10:46 AM • View Comments

GhostBuster

This is a really interesting technical report from Microsoft. It describes a clever prototype—called GhostBuster—they developed for detecting arbitrary persistent and stealthy software, such as rootkits, Trojans, and software keyloggers. It’s a really elegant idea, based on a simple observation: the rootkit must exist on disk to be persistent, but must lie to programs running within the infected OS in order to hide.

Here’s how it works: The user has the GhostBuster program on a CD. He sticks the CD in the drive, and from within the (possibly corrupted) OS, the checker program runs: stopping all other user programs, flushing the caches, and then doing a complete checksum of all files on the disk and a scan of any registry keys that could autostart the system, writing out the results to a file on the hard drive.

Then the user is instructed to press the reset button, the CD boots its own OS, and the scan is repeated. Any differences indicate a rootkit or other stealth software, without the need for knowing what particular rootkits are or the proper checksums for the programs installed on disk.

Simple. Clever. Elegant.

In order to fool GhostBuster, the rootkit must 1) detect that such a checking program is running and either not lie to it or change the output as it’s written to disk (in the limit this becomes the halting problem for the rootkit designer), 2) integrate into the BIOS rather than the OS (tricky, platform specific, and not always possible), or 3) give up on either being persistent or stealthy. Thus this doesn’t eliminate rootkits entirely, but is a pretty mortal blow to persistent rootkits.

Of course, the concept could be adopted for any other operating system as well.

This is a great idea, but there’s a huge problem. GhostBuster is only a research prototype, so you can’t get a copy. And, even worse, Microsoft has no plans to turn it into a commercial tool.

This is too good an idea to abandon. Microsoft, if you’re listening, you should release this tool to the world. Make it public domain. Make it open source, even. It’s a great idea, and you deserve credit for coming up with it.

Any other security companies listening? Make and sell one of these. Anyone out there looking for an open source project? Here’s a really good one.

Note: I have no idea if Microsoft patented this idea. If they did and they don’t release it, shame on them. If they didn’t, good for them.

Posted on February 15, 2005 at 8:00 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.