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Exposing Bots In Big Companies
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Apr 30, 2007 09:24 PM
from the pwned dept.
from the pwned dept.
CalicoPenny let us know about yet another "30 days" effort, this one to name the names of major companies infected with spam-spewing bots. Support Intelligence began the effort on March 28, out of frustration at not being able to attract the attention of anyone who could fix the problems at these companies. While they haven't named 30 companies over the ensuing month, they did name some prominent ones, such as Thompson Financial, Bank of America, and AIG. The scary part is that if a bot can spam it can capture keystrokes or troll for interesting documents.
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Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Or troll slashdot.
Gives a whole new meaning (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gives a whole new meaning (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from IT efforts to clean up (or at least keep their heads above water), the percentages would likely compare favorably with the home user population at large, methinks. Sometimes (like ferinstance the company I work for) can be outright anal about security (custom images, email that's filtered nine ways from Sunday, etc), and yet about once a month scans will pop up someone who has been bit with the latest variant of (insert malware here). To their credit, the guys here remove it often within minutes of detection- never seen one last more than a couple of hours. (not just saying that because I happen to be a sysadmin there, seriously... the user-end guys are anal about that sort of thing, and if they weren't the network guys would happily shut off the offending port @ the switch to get the user's attention).
Good to see the word getting out. (Score:3, Insightful)
The Register reported this about a month ago [slashdot.org] and I'm glad the issue is getting the attention it deserves. Having done some "upgrades" for a major bank and worked at a fortune 500 company, I can say that many supposedly secure corporate networks are owned by spammers. It's a big deal because it's hard to filter out.
the percentages would likely compare favorably with the home user population at large, methinks.
You would think that, seeing how much money these companies have to throw into manpower and so
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Compared to government agencies (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it is interesting that we see "report cards" that give government agencies low grades on security, but publicly-owned corporations get a pass.
I seriously doubt that there are any botnets like this running on, say, the DoD network, yet they get a poor grade on security, while a frigging -bank- is pwned, and nobody is too bothered.
Parent
Re:Compared to government agencies (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd suspect that this is mostly because info about government security problems is often available, while corporations (public or private) are generally very secretive about such problems. Journalists have a tendency to report news when they have information, and not report when they don't have information. People conclude that there are problems in government agencies, but not in corporations. But the correct conclusion is usually "We don't know whether the corporate world has these problems, because we can't get information from them."
Maybe a better approach would be to surmise that, if an organization of any sort is hiding information, this means that it has something going on that it doesn't want us to know.
(Applying this to the Bush Administration rapidly leads to a high degree of suspicion.
Parent
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So, the systems do not get easily infected and when they do, they cannot spam the outside world.
But of course, there are too many users that think they need admin access (and worse: need it all the time). And the worst of those are the programmers. They think they need admin access and fail to test their products under a lesser
Send in the lawyers (Score:5, Interesting)
Who works for IT divisions in big companies? (Score:4, Insightful)
The notion that lots of big companies have spam bots all over the place is not all that hard for me to believe. Their IT divisions are often poorly staffed with folks who were selected with more input from HR than from the actual manager. They look at the certificates and then decide if a person is OK for the job. Honestly, the certificates are not a good gatekeepers to ensure that people without a clue don't find themselves on the front line. They can't be.
We all have known people who were extremely good at passing tests, but for reasons unknown to the rest of us, are unable to use those very skills in a real application. Those are the people who all too frequently end up in big organizations, pretending to know what real IT is. There is no substitute for learning from experience.
And these corporations are about to have one of those learning experiences. It won't be pleasant.
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The folks I work for has roughly 100,000+ employees, but as the sysadmin for one of the R&D labs, I'm given some very wide latitude. In exchange, I have to be a lot more flexible on lots of aspects than the guys who keep the production servers/network/etc going. IT's a trade-off, but one that I truly enjoy.
I can't hide behind policy to keep my schedule sane as a downside, in spite of working for a company whose production I
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No offense, but simply because you're allowed to thrive doesn't mean you have the foggiest idea what you're doing with respect to keeping your machines clean.
None taken - my own evaluation of proficiency is judged by the results of my work as audited on a periodic semi-random basis. Because of the nature of my specific duties, I cannot simply hand off localized email filtering duties to "the email guys", hand off local IOS patching and vigilance to "the network guys", the Oracle and MySQL patches to "the DB guys", and etc. In fact, if anything goes splat in the lab security-wise and spreads to the corp network? I daresay that I'm more responsible for the resu
exposing == alienating potential clients? (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I wrong? Should I publish the list of companies that I know had bots on their networks in March?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> if they're there, are often ignored.
IT at big companies are kept busy just trying to keep the base OS and necessary apps puttering along, and resurrecting users' workstations that have melted down or upchucked. Their mediocrity is enforced by the needs and whims of the big suits and PHBs. Corporate budgeting for IT is on a need-to-go basis. If IT has any money left at the end of a fiscal year, rather than letting them put it
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IT divisions in big companies? (Score:3, Interesting)
"I know many others who also have these certificates. Their capabilities range from extraordinarily adept, to blithering idiot."
So how did you get technically proficient if you weren't a blithering idiot(but willing to learn) at some point? How did you learn without a few stumbles? As you pointed out, the certifications are often your way in the door. I think it's hard to become technically proficient with a large network without experience.
"
Ya know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Make it interesting. Start out asking for people's opinions on spam. Get 'em good and worked up. Then set up some network monitor with a nice, easy-to-see graphic interface (maybe write one) and demonstrate how a workstation gets infected by the user running a compromised app. Once it takes hold (pick a good one), pull out the stopwatch, tick off 5-10 seconds, then show how many mails it sent. Then do the math; multiply those ten seconds by 6 to get minutes, then 60, to get hours, then 24. I bet even the math-challenged will get the point quickly, looking at those really large numbers.
Re:Ya know... (Score:5, Funny)
Then, to ensure you reach 100% of your target audience, convert the presentation to an animated
Parent
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Class Action risk for using Microsoft's Products (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Class Action risk for using Microsoft's Product (Score:2)
A lot of the MS Wi
Re:Class Action risk for using Microsoft's Product (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Shouldn't be too hard? (Score:5, Interesting)
It scares me just how prevalent this type of software is.. not just the spam bots but the malware and other stuff meant to steal data. Locating+shutting down spambots is the easiest task. I'm pretty small time but I found something interesting once while working with a new client to get them fixed up with antivirus and internet monitoring software (squid+sarg). I'd locked down some things and I kept noticing one PC trying to connect to yahoo every week at about 2:00 am. Long story short it was apparently attempting to email a 500kb attachment... that was apparently a log of everything typed in the week before and some other stuff. That *almost* went unnoticed. That type of infection is downright scary.... who is going to notice a 500kb email going out through an https connection at yahoo? It didn't even seem to be part of a command+control network... just gathering info??
The spambot infections is just the most visible symptom of a larger problem... they're talking about some "big name" companies apparently, but it is the smaller and medium sized businesses that really make the world tick... it is simply too complex, challenging and costly to really secure windows boxes without severely compromising functionality. It is also apparently not something that lends itself well to automation... I see big companies using enterprise software to "lock down" workstations and "reset" workstation images as their solution but there isn't really a small business answer here that I know of. If the tools were better/easier to use it might be easier to keep an eye on one's "flock" but it is a horrible pain both in setup and upkeep to really anticipate what might be happening. The entire stack one could use in windows to manage this stuff, from Event Logging to vb scripting automation, and all the way up to group policy is half-assed at best. This is the type of result you can expect.
this type of story is why I think that learning and/or heuristic scanners (both at the machine and router/firewall/proxy level) are pretty much the only way we can win. I'm not imagining something sentient, mind you, just something that will sift through all the event logs and point me toward things actually worth my attention instead of "every little thing".
Why don't they block outgoing smtp traffic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this not "best practice"?
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But our department doesn't have the clout to override the other VPs desire to keep that functionality.
In fact, I think part of the argument is that we can't respond to their needs quickly enough, partly because we're running around dealing with stuff we wouldn't have to if we were allowed to do things right =-/
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But by then we are dealing with a known quantity at a central location. These companies should be blocking everything their users don't need first and foremost, then they can look at the traffic from their mail server and use standard off the shelf pattern analysis to find the spammer bots.
It's simple security.
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Canary (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. But -if you are monitoring your FW logs-, you will see the not so cleverly-written ones, and they can be your "canary in the coalmine". If you are seeing any denied outbound attempts, you know that either someone (or some software) is going against policy, or you have a workstation weakness that is being exploited, and you follow up on it.
Sure, this doesn't guarantee that you don't have a problem (ie., cleverly-written malware). You must take a layered approach to security strategy to be effective. Discounting a layer because it doesn't take every single possibility into account is ridiculous. That's why you have depth built into your security strategy, because no single layer works for everything.
That is the problem with most "security solutions" that are being peddled to CIOs, they claim to be a single magic bullet when real security solutions are more about correlation and follow-up from different layers. Not sexy, but very effective.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. But it's still a good idea to block port 25 on business or educational networks unless it's absolutely needed - as it prevents one class of abusers, i.e. direct-to-mx sending malware, making use of that particular method on your network. There still seems to be a lot of direct-to-mx stuff in circulation, if the evidence in our logfiles is any
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are ways to block that behaviour. You could use SMTP AUTH to authenticate connections to the SMTP server and SSL/TLS to encrypt the connection. That way the bots won't be able to use the SMTP server to send their spam.
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How to think like a manager 101: You are presented with two answers to a single problem. One; is to "task" the network/email admins to fix a problem. Two; involves blaming a large vendor. One of these answers actually lets you accomplish something, while the other doesn't. Which do you choo
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It means you have logs, however. And company mail servers can be run in a far more ``shoot first, ask questions afterwards'' mode because there are far fewer reasons for `abnormal' traffic: for example, a user sending high volumes of messages has fewer legitimate reasns.
I run the whole internal network on RFC1918, with acce
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This wins the DUH award (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, yeah, that's why, like, some of us actually run a secure operating system instead of freaking Windows.
I look forward to the day when proposing a Windows SOE is a firing offence. As for the state of American IT... Aren't you guys supposed to have landed on the moon, way back before Microshit was founded? WHAT HAPPENED TO Y'ALL?
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I look forward to the day when proposing a Windows SOE is a firing offence. As for the state of American IT... Aren't you guys supposed to have landed on the moon, way back before Microshit was founded? WHAT HAPPENED TO Y'ALL?
Well first Microsoft Windows is the most widely used OS in the world. So if "Y'ALL" is referring to the people of the U.S., it looks like we made the most popular OS in the world, which you are probably running. On top of that a large number of the developers of open sources systems are from the U.S. as well. Then of all these "major companies" that are infected (think Fortune 500 or Fortune 100), a large portion [majority?] are U.S. companies. So it doesn't look like a whole lot happened besides a lot
Exposing Bots in Big Companies (Score:4, Funny)
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Nah, they're the "dolts".
Another term people often confuse with "bots" is "bods" who tend to work in HR and Marketing. Unfortunately they also tend to have Middle-Management-like qualities.
No way (Score:3, Insightful)
Sarbanes-Oxley (Score:3, Interesting)
My understanding is that Sarbanes-Oxley imposes strict IT standards for public companies.
If the companies involved are indeed Fortune 500 companies then they are exposing themselves to massive lawsuits.
In the big company that I work in this couldn't happen: we have good firewalls, machines are locked down in terms of downloads, machines are regularly tested/audited and we have a great IT department.
If I were a CEO of one of these companies I'd be looking to fire the CIO...
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If I were a shareholder, I'd be asking for the resignation of the CEO... the buck stops with him...
Bank of America (Score:3, Interesting)
So you mean that some of those Bank of America SPAMs are actually coming from Bank of America computers? Woh...
IT jitters (Score:2, Insightful)
I could lock down that
I misunderstood... (Score:2)
Would prefer outing spam buyers (Score:3, Interesting)
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