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WMF Exploit Sold Underground for $4,000

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu Feb 02, 2006 04:34 PM
from the now-that's-just-scary dept.
Security IT
tero1176 writes "Eweek has a story with information from Kaspersky showing that exploit code used in the WMF malware attack was being peddled on underground sites by rival Russian hacker groups for $4,000 in early December. The first sign of an exploit was traced back to the December 1, 2005, a full month before anti-virus vendors started noticing mysterious WMF files rigged with malicious executable code. It serves as more proof that the market for malware is well and truly alive."
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  • Bad Deal (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lseltzer (311306) on Thursday February 02 2006, @04:36PM (#14630028)
    The exploit is a flop. The guy should get his money back.
    • The exploit is a flop. The guy should get his money back.

      Huh? It worked just dandy on all the machines I tested on. Well, at least the Metasploit WMF exploit [metasploit.com] mods did.

      It's not the sellers fault those pesky white hat hackers discovered it so soon. :) Buyer beware!
      • It worked, but it was supposed to be the tool of a major outbreak that never materialized, and is now unlikely to.

        • "It worked, but it was supposed to be the tool of a major outbreak that never materialized, and is now unlikely to."

          True, but it never happened in the same way the Y2K crisis 'didn't happen'. It was prevented by the concerted action of a very large number of people who re-emptively developed and deployed a patch to fill the gap until the vendor-provided one happened along. If it hadn't been for the public dissemination of the risk assessment and analytical data, this could have been a big problem.

          That s

    • Re:Bad Deal (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DrSkwid (118965) on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:30PM (#14630495) Homepage Journal
      If you buy an exploit for $4000, chances are you already have a target.

      And, you've probably bought one before and made more than the $4000 you are about to spend.

      Perhaps they got the trade secrets / passwords they were after in a few hours, not the month it took to become Zero Day, lol, now there's a misnomer !

  • Maybe they should get involved... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Thursday February 02 2006, @04:38PM (#14630042) Homepage Journal
    It serves as more proof that the market for malware is well and truly alive."

    Do you suppose Microsoft will try to enter this market, too?

  • What, you expected... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Orrin Bloquy (898571) on Thursday February 02 2006, @04:39PM (#14630050) Journal
    ...open source exploits for a commercial OS?

    Joke, don't waste your mod points here.

  • Access to this market (Score:5, Funny)

    by davidgrouchy (661051) on Thursday February 02 2006, @04:41PM (#14630073) Homepage Journal
    Will my AT&T "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access provide access to this underground market ?

  • Russians eh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dragon of the Pants (913545) on Thursday February 02 2006, @04:44PM (#14630103) Homepage
    In Soviet Russia, code exploits you!
    • how many times will 'jokes' like this be modded funny?
      • The whole point of jokes like that is they get funnier the more worn out and lame they get. They arent supposed to be funny in themselves. I suppose its a cultural thing. I cant stand slapstick and US humour with pie throwing and at the same time i cant understand why someone dont think the dead parrot with Monty Python is hilarious.
  • My biggest question is, where is the eBay link to the sale?

  • And who is surprised (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theCat (36907) on Thursday February 02 2006, @04:51PM (#14630171) Journal
    There have been shadowy glimpses of this "other economy" for a while, in the bot army cottage industry and the various rackets where popular sites are threatened with black-out if they don't pay for "protection". But all that is just the warmup to the big show.

    Organized crime has found the internet, and they seem to like what they see. It's just like one huge, dark alley lined with endless smoke-filled lounges. Lots of seamy places to meet up. Anonimity if you want it. Under-the-table dealings. Faceless bosses and eager young turks with itchy trigger fingers.

    The perfect growth media for scum and parasites.
  • It serves as more proof that the market for malware is well and truly alive.

    No kidding, they've got a whole aisle over at Fry's for this stuff. No, not the anti-viral stuff. Look over in the office productivity and word processing section. They even bundle it together sometimes!
  • So, let's hear someone argue against full disclosure now, eh?
      • In the first case, full disclosure means that everyone will know it, which will allow all the black hats to exploit the public with it before the company has a chance to fix it and deploy (or at least try) the fix.

        BZZZZT! WRONG!

        The only people going to be exploited in this case are the people who CONTINUE TO USE THE SERVICE DESPITE PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE THAT IT IS INSECURE.

        Imagine there's a server out there with all your financial infomation on it. If someone gets access to it you'll be ruined. Do you reall
  • It just goes to show how much the underground actually retains as far as exploit code is concered. Makes you think what else is circulating which the general public doesnt know about.

  • The War Against Spam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Phroggy (441) * <slashdot3NO@SPAMphroggy.com> on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:01PM (#14630267) Homepage
    This is a huge issue that the general public is completely unaware of. Most people still believe that viruses are created as an annoying prank by kids with something to prove. This may be true in some cases, but most of the malware out there now is created for a very specific purpose: building a botnet that can be sold for cold hard cash to the highest bidder. Who's buying them? Spammers.

    It used to be that spammers would look for open relay servers in third-world countries, and let those servers do all the work of actually sending the messages. The server administrators either didn't care, or didn't know how to fix the problem, and the language barrier made things difficult. So, people started making blacklists of known open relays, and just refusing any mail that came from those IPs. Spammers would keep finding more open relays, and the blacklists grew.

    Eventually, mail servers started coming pre-configured not to allow relaying, and as servers were upgraded, spammers had to move on. Spammers started commissioning worms, paying people to write software that would infect Windows machines remotely over the Internet, and open up a backdoor for the spammers to access. Suddenly you've got hundreds of thousands of IP addresses responsible for sending spam, with many of them on dynamic IPs. There's no good way to blacklist them all, since they keep changing!

    Enter Windows XP Service Pack 2, with a software firewall enabled by default. As people upgrade, worms like Code Red and Nimda are no longer effective. So what's next? Spreading viruses through e-mail, IM, and the Web.

    So, look for improvements in antivirus software in the next couple of years, as the war against spam continues. Then look for the spammers to find a new way to get their crap into your inbox.

    • Re:The War Against Spam (Score:5, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:24PM (#14630459) Homepage Journal

      Enter Windows XP Service Pack 2, with a software firewall enabled by default. As people upgrade, worms like Code Red and Nimda are no longer effective. So what's next? Spreading viruses through e-mail, IM, and the Web.

      You left out something important: Outlook express would execute code by default, so email was kind of the de facto vector for virus propagation until they started closing down OE [somewhat] and that's when worms really took off.

      Before that, it was mostly viruses attached to programs. You'd attach a new virus to some really desirable warez and upload the stuff to a BBS. The BBS owner would run the software and the virus would attach itself to lots of other software, any time they repacked it for their chosen archive format...

      • Before that, it was mostly viruses attached to programs. You'd attach a new virus to some really desirable warez and upload the stuff to a BBS. The BBS owner would run the software and the virus would attach itself to lots of other software, any time they repacked it for their chosen archive format...

        That was a different kind of virus, not sponsored by spammers. Back then, it really WAS created by kids with something to prove, and there was no money in it.

        You're right about Outlook Express (although I thin

  • DRM needed (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:05PM (#14630299)
    Ironically, copies of the exploit were pirated by a group of Chinese hackers and sold on Ebay for pennies on the dollar...

  • A "Do we report it" Story (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OctoberSky (888619) on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:16PM (#14630383)
    This is one of those "Do we, the media, report it?" stories.
    This article is pretty meaningless as far as the bigger picture goes, and it probably could have gone unpublished in my mind and no one would have really cared. But it may do more damage than good by being published.
    This article shows, and maybe it's because I work with criminals all day (Public Defenders office), that writing malware pays. Before it was for notoriety or to prove you could or to piss people off, but now it can provide an income source and I think we will be seeing more of it from now on just because people are going to be trying to make a buck off of it.
    We live in a socitey where a Million-Dolllar-Homepage gets filled (it recently did), where the Gotti family has its own TV show and where Carrot top is a rich man. Our lust for money leads us down the less then friendly paths, and this article reports, once again... that crime does infact pay.
    • Yea, but everyone already knew that (crime pays). Luckily, finding security holes in products is hard work and that keeps most of the criminally inclined away.
    • You only have to look at the history of the world and where the govts. of Europe came from.

      My govt. is the ashes of the 1066 invasion of England by France, definitely a crime. Our Royal Family are some of the world's richest people. They didn't amass that fortune through hard work, sweat and toil. Their ancestors killed people for it. Plain and simple.

      Crime pays, it even pays you!

  • Hmm.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by punkr0x (945364) on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:24PM (#14630452)
    So is windows exploits are worth $4,000 a pop, and Bill Gates is worth something like $50 billion, that adds up to... 12.5 million windows exploits. That number seems a little low, must be not all of them are worth 4 grand.

  • More expensive with Vista (Score:3, Funny)

    by jbeaupre (752124) on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:34PM (#14630530)
    It will cost an extra $500 to get set up to sign your malware in order for it to install. Good thinking Microsoft. That extra 12.5% tax will make it totally uneconomical.

  • From summary: "The first sign of an exploit was traced back to the December 1, 2005, a full month before anti-virus vendors started noticing mysterious WMF files rigged with malicious executable code."

    From article: "The first sign of an exploit was traced back to the middle of December 2005, a full two weeks before anti-virus vendors started noticing mysterious WMF files rigged with malicious executable code..."

    Oh... actually, to be fair, the article does carry on to say: "...it was most likely that t

  • Amusing advert (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eyepeepackets (33477) on Thursday February 02 2006, @06:27PM (#14630850)
    How appropriate that a Microsoft "Get the Facts" ad should show up at the top of this particular page -- gotta love that Murphy guy when he works in your favor.

    To the Microsoft Marketing folks: I'd trade you a fact for a clue but since you have neither facts nor clues I guess we won't be doing business any time soon.

    Cheers.

  • They didn't know how much it was worth (Score:3, Insightful)

    by keen (86192) on Thursday February 02 2006, @07:02PM (#14631110)
    According to Gostev, the rival hacker gangs did not seem to fully understand the exact nature of the vulnerability.

    Otherwise it should have gone for much more than $4,000, even in a black market. Imagine an exploit where you can gain access to any Windows computer on Earth for the last several builds of Windows?

    This is why we should set up companies to act as middleman and legitimately buy exploits. They would pay more and we would be able to get things patched quicker.

  • unknown name? (Score:5, Funny)

    by AyeRoxor! (471669) on Thursday February 02 2006, @07:19PM (#14631220) Homepage Journal
    "[...] the vulnerability was detected by an unnamed person around Dec. 1, 2005."

    Ok, what are the chances that this person really has no name?!

    I'm going to have to call shenanigans on this whole article.

  • Great seller! (Score:4, Funny)

    by saboola (655522) on Thursday February 02 2006, @09:13PM (#14631865)
    Exploit works as advertised!!! Speedy email!! Would Buy From AGAIN!! A+++++++++++! :)

    • Windows Only? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ackthpt (218170) * on Thursday February 02 2006, @04:49PM (#14630156) Homepage Journal
      As usual, Mac and Linux users are unaffected and wonder why everyone relies on such unreliable software. And the world turns...

      So you think Mac and Linux are as unlikely to be unaffected by such?

      While it might be hard to purposely code exploits into Windows and Mac, if you were an insider plotting to take advantage of it some day and don't mind losing your job over it. Isn't it more possible to pull a fast one on Open Source, assuming you covered your tracks well enough the few would find it on first glance.

      I remember a mud client, early version of Tintin, IIRC, which would make all players shout "Snowy rules, OK" if a client saw some particular text. Not necessarily as bad as it could have been, someone could code the client to [remove all, drop all, flee] on a command if they had wanted. People only became aware of the stunt after the coder logged onto a mud and said "yo"

      • Re:Windows Only? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by user24 (854467) on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:15PM (#14630372) Homepage
        Already tried - a little while ago someone tried to slip a backdoor into the linux kernel.

        Fortunately, the backdoor was caught via exactly the kind of peer review that open source allows.

        see http://kerneltrap.org/node/1584 [kerneltrap.org]

        with open source, it's easier to get trojaned code in, but harder for it to stay there. on the reverse, who knows what could be lurking in MS code? I quote:

        "A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed."
        (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,5264,00.asp [eweek.com])

      • Re:Windows Only? (Score:4, Funny)

        by AndroidCat (229562) on Thursday February 02 2006, @06:15PM (#14630779) Homepage
        I remember a mud client, early version of Tintin, IIRC, which would make all players shout "Snowy rules, OK" if a client saw some particular text.

        Not unlike Slashdot where certain text will cause all readers to post "All your base", "Soviet Russia", "..only old people", "3. Profit!" comments.

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