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Storm Worm Botnet Partitions May Be Up For Sale
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Oct 16, 2007 11:00 AM
from the if-only-they'd-use-their-powers-for-good dept.
from the if-only-they'd-use-their-powers-for-good dept.
Bowling for cents writes "There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, and a ZDNet post thinks that's a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers. The latest variants of Storm are now using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet/eDonkey peer-to-peer traffic, meaning that each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key. This effectively allows the Storm author to segment the Storm botnet into smaller networks. This could be a precursor to selling Storm to other spammers, as an end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities."
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Storm Worm Rising 218 comments
The Storm worm has been an increasing problem in the last few months, but a change in tactics may mean something big is going to happen. The article discusses a bit of back story about the worm, including the somewhat frightening numbers about the millions of spam emails carrying the worm payload. They estimate between a quarter and a million infected systems usable for spam or DDOS attacks.
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Storm Worm More Powerful Than Top Supercomputers 390 comments
Stony Stevenson writes to mention that some security researchers are claiming that the Storm Worm has grown so massive that it could rival the world's top supercomputers in terms of raw power. "Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity. 'We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,' he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. 'That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.'"
Submission: Storm Worm Botnet Partitions for Sale by Anonymous Coward
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Storm Worm Being Reduced to a Squall 183 comments
Rumours of financial schemes surrounding the botnet aside, PC World has an article that should lower the blood pressure of some SysAdmins. The Storm Worm botnet is apparently shrinking. A researcher out of UC San Diego who has been tracking the network has published a report indicating it is now only 10% of its former size. "Some estimates have put Storm at 50 million computers, a number that would give its controllers access to more processing power than the world's most powerful supercomputer. But Enright said that the real story is significantly less terrifying. In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time. Enright guessed that a total of about 15 million PCs have been infected by Storm in the nine months it has been around, although the vast majority of those have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network."
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What is fast flux DNS? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What is fast flux DNS? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What is fast flux DNS? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What is fast flux DNS? (Score:4, Informative)
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Are there legitimate reasons to do this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. Re:Are there legitimate reasons to do this... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I defintiely see ISPs that don't respect DNS TTLs
Re:Yes. Re:Are there legitimate reasons to do this (Score:4, Insightful)
It really only makes a difference if your domain's TTL is short before you need to make the change.
Parent
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The other issue is that TTL is a suggested time for keeping your records alive. The other (caching) nameserver can choose to ignore it (to circumvent stuff like this botnet or just to keep it's own load down) or if it can't reach your nameservers after that TTL you specified it will just
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No governments are interested in dealing with this problem.
Three words (Score:3, Insightful)
How long before.. (Score:5, Interesting)
How long before Storm is better than the Internet?
It seems to be peer-2-peer, can host files, must be reliable (DNS and all that), encrypted traffic.
If you assume Internet is past its sell by date, what would the next generation network look like?
:-)
(OK, maybe it wouldn't be owned by the mafia (insert USA joke here))
Parent
"not truly inventive"??? WTH? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Microsoft?
Re-infect it how? (Score:3, Insightful)
Survival of the fittest in action (Score:3, Insightful)
These things are getting so insidious and vast in scope, I'm honestly wondering if I can safely believe that any Windows machine I come across with problems ISN'T on Storm or one of the other botnets. At what point does having a multi-use computing device become more of a problem than the benefits it provides? If 90% of what you get for connecting to the Internet is problems, what's the point? Bile spewing bloggers, bought-and-paid news reports and total advertising awareness?
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Plus, botnets are pretty sweet. I wouldn't mind having one myself, for, you know, distributed compiles or something
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You may not be able to blame anyone. But I can certainly assign blame.
Is the person/group that designed this botnet talented? Without a doubt. Do they deserve respect? Hell, no.
If you respect this person, then you would have to also respect the people who put together those televangelist networks and faith-healers. Liars, cheats, and thieves. They deserve no respect.
Re:Survival of the fittest in action (Score:5, Interesting)
I spyware scanned three PCs belonging to two friends/family households. Naturally, they were all Windows. I used Webroot Spysweeper which is pretty good but costs, and Kaspersky online scan, which is good but slow, and virus only.
- PC 1: infected with various spyware and a backdoor trojan (remote access by the bad guys) - had an up to date antivirus (AVG) that didn't spot any of this, but no anti-spyware installed.
- PC 2 (same network as 1): couldn't even install new software (error on running any new
- PC 3: (2nd household) - infected with a different backdoor trojan and several viruses. Had Norton anti-virus that had not updated since 2004.
I would assume the average Windows PC has a high chance of some sort of infection, unless the users are very careful about installing third party software, some of which carries spyware or worse, and clicking on links in IE. Even Firefox had spyware on one of these machines.
Windows PCs run by power users (not the users here) can be somewhat secure, but it's painful to make them so. One colleague who's very techie still got infected by a PDF security hole recently, so you need Secunia PSI to run continuously, as well as monitoring some security blogs, and updating software regularly, as well as using a good anti-spyware tool, not using IE/Outlook, etc etc. However, once you are making this much effort, the work needed to install Ubuntu becomes much less of a hurdle - you might as well just switch over one PC so you have a safe PC for online shopping/banking etc.
The only good thing about this story is that nothing very important was being done on these PCs - little online shopping and no online banking... however, that's the users' self-reported status and they may well not want to admit they are at risk.
I don't do this for a living, I'm just a Windows and Linux user who wondered why there were so many popups on one of these PCs and ended up getting sucked into this when I should have been socialising - fortunately anti-spyware scans can run during dinner...
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FWIW & YMMV, I setup my family and acquaintances with XP-SP2, IE7, Windows Defender and the latest version of SAV Corporate/Enterprise in Unmanaged mode. I just turn on Automatic Updates in Windows and setup the AV software to update every night. My biggest "problem user" is a girl whose laptop was completely owned by spyware when I first met her. After a pave and rebuild wi
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Because, and only because, I refuse to hook it to a network while I'm trying to de-worm it.
the point (Score:3, Funny)
Slashvertising. (Score:5, Funny)
Clever (Score:5, Funny)
Windows has downloaded a new security update. Do you wish to install?
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Break the key with zombies? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Break the key with zombies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Just curious.. (Score:4, Funny)
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Blue Frog remembrance... (Score:5, Insightful)
One year later, spammers are ALREADY using a P2P system for such thing, while nobody has the means to counter them.
The lesson: They got ahead of us. It's time we invest in countermeasures of our own, or succumb to the enemy. Because, we're losing.
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If the dynamic residential r
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Blocking port 25 is a reasonable idea, and many ISPs do it, but to say to do otherwise is criminally negligent or that doing so would stop worms from spreading is completely absurd.
Pretty much the only effective tool ISPs have is to completely shut down the connection to any infected computer. But people will (rightly) get upset about that.
Bruce Schneier discusses the Storm Worm (Score:5, Informative)
A good essay on the Storm Worm and how it works and how it can be prevented (or rather why it CAN'T be prevented in many cases).
Fixing one part (Score:2)
Yes, it's inconvenient to some ("wah! but I run sendmail off my laptop on dial-up!" - Yeah, well, go back in time to 1993 and have yourself a ball...). Frankly, they can just get the hell over it and use one of a dozen other methods to send out mail or increase their TTL. Spam is way more inconvenient and it affects everyone.
This doesn't address other uses for these botne
So, how bad is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
These blurbs, if they're true, paint a bleak picture. Should the hackers leverage the network's full power, couldn't they shut down just about any server on earth? And imagine the bandwidth costs of this thing operating at full force.
So for those in the know, is Storm just a way to propagate spam and annoy people? Or is it something even more dangerous?
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What is the difference between that statement and "I have no idea how many, so I'll toss out scary numbers."
(hint: the second statement is honest)
Rename (Score:4, Funny)
How would this service be marketed? (Score:2)
What is preventing a sting? (Score:3, Insightful)
And if we don't have the REAL people to work on this, perhaps we should hire Hollywood to get the job done because it seems like the only real law enforcement that happens these days is in the movies or on TV.
CmdrTaco is behind this (Score:5, Funny)
The updates are part of the Slashdot tenth anniversary auction. In addition to the @slashdot.org address and low user id, CmdrTaco has also gotten the operators of the Storm Worm Botnet to auction its use off as part of the charity action.
Some potential uses for the winning bidder:
Only one way anything will be done about this (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone hates spam, but spam filtering techniques have progressed to the point where we're at an uneasy stalemate with spammers. Everyone hates DDoS attacks, but in truth, how many people have really been the victim of one, and how many companies with muscle are really vulnerable to a normal-sized one? What will have to happen is that some overambitious crook gets it in their head to attack a Google or a Level3 or an Amazon or a national military, and puts the muscle behind it to make it work. It'll take players of that sort of weight to induce ISPs to do what they should have been doing all this time - proactively detecting botnet traffic and suspending the account of any user, individual or corporation, participating in such botnets.
I suppose we could also black hole enough of the world that the botnet controllers are forced into the reach of countries with tough computer anticrime resources, where they can be put behind bars and well out of the reach of any keyboard. I'm just not quite sure the Russians will stand for that....
Is the 40 byte key attackable? (Score:3, Interesting)
What would it take to attack the 40 byte key? Imagine a coordinated effort by the biggest 500 gouverment computing setups around the world. All the blue genes and whatnot pitching in. The Japanese sure have the one or other state-of-the-art mainframe supercomputer, and CERN, ESA, Nasa and few German weather services have a few aswell. There is tons of horsepower laying around idle at agencies, bureaus and the occasional school or corporation. If they all pitch in in a coordinated brute force attack *and* have Seti@Home do a few hours too it should be possible, no? Especially if one takes into account that at least the NSA has mathmatical functions that do some of the dirty work and speed up the process a little. They wouldn't even have to publish them.
Wait, let's just check:
255 to the power of 40 is rougly 1.8 times 10 to the power of 96 (Gulp!). Thats nearly Gogol. (10^100, what Google initially was supposed to be called, the guy registering the domain mixed up the letters...)
Whatever.
On it goes: For the sake of ease I'll roughly estimate that after the overhead has been dealt with, half of the top 500 (or a simular setup) will be doing optimized attacks on an average of 50 billion tries per second. An average state-of-the-art mid-range server has aprox. 20 GigaFLOPS, so I think that's fairly realistic for a large mainframe doing a multi-step operation.
250 * 50 000 000 000 = 1.25*10^13 tries per second.
*60*60*24 makes 1.08*10^18 per day. [Sidenote: This may be way off wack allready and total bollocks but it's fun actually]
*7*52*5 makes 1.96*10^21. Oh, gee. This doesn't look to good. Where at it for 5 years and have only covered less than the fourth root of our total amount of keys. Even if we had 10 times the power it would make up only 1 percent of the keypace. Sheesh. We'll probably be cheaper off in handing out Linux PCs to everyone on the planet.
It's no use. I gotta start working on my next project: Finding an explicit function for prime numbers. Hehehe. I could use the Million from the Fields Medal too.
Bottom line: My question/assumption was lame. But at least I found out myself.
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Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple answer, complex solution.
First your firewall, useless (against storm). One of the attack paths of storm is to get YOU the user to visit an infected site, often by sending you an email. Unless your firewall somehow knows ALL infected sites and blocks them all (unlikely) the email will arrive, and the site will be visited and the trojan loaded. You could setup a firewall that protects against this, but you don't have one, because if you did, you wouldn't have to ask, you would know. Firewalls only help against worm attacks, were an outside computer probes your network for weaknesses. IF you configure your firewall extremely rigidly and only allow known traffic through it, then malware on your network could be blinded, unable to connect to any command parts of the storm network. It is possible to use for instance iptables (linux) to inspect all packages going through it and simply drop unwanted traffic. Since storm now apparently uses encrypted p2p(edonkey) traffic this shouldn't even be too hard. This would however result in a less userfriendly network. The only experience I got was in a setup that ONLY wanted regular HTTP traffic, and this meant a LOT of stuff failed, even web traffic because not all web application create proper headers. (I wonder what the recent MS stealth update means for windows, did this traffic pass unseen through software firewalls?)
Then your AV software. Forget about it, storm mutates itself. Since AV software mostly works with signatures, it can never be uptodate enough. I read a report that it changes every half hour. How the hell are you going to keep your signature data that uptodate?
Windows patches. They ain't uptodate thanks to MS dreaded patch tuesday. THis means that a security hole can EASILY be unpatched for weeks. COnsidering this is MS we are talking about, practice is far longer. You will be the target of exploits MS does not know about yet, won't develop a patch for for months, that they will delay for weeks to deploy and for which the AV companies do not have signature.
Anyway the most recent big security hole involves PDF's, that is Adobe, nothing to do with MS. You have to be uptodate on EVERYTHING. That includes EVERY codec, every handler EVERY single piece of code on your computer. Have an image browser installed? Are you sure that not a single on of the image codecs it uses has a flaw? If you update one image browser are you sure that not one single program on your computer still uses an old library that is still vulnerable? Remember, if a storm attack only infects a fraction of a percentage of computers, they still got hundreds of thousands of machines.
START TO GET THE PICTURE?
Basically you are like a good soldier, who keeps his gun clean, doesn't screw with hookers and stays awake on guard asking how well he standsup to a full out nuclear war. YOU ARE TOAST PRIVATE!
But there is hope, the most common form of infection is still through user interaction. YOU have to open the PDF, you have to execute the exe/scr/sh/dmg/whatever, you have to visit the link. The most powerfull attack is social engineering, get that soldier in his invincible armour to pickup a grenade and eat it.
The really odd thing is that you do not even have to be paranoid to avoid it. Just don't click on things. IF somebody sends you a story headline, visit the BBC site yourselve. If somebody wants to send you pictures of some celeb flashing her aging bits, don't. There is plenty of fresh porn with nice looking girls out there (cheggit.net).
So what do you need to stay safe?
Mostly, your brain. Disable every bit of automation in software and instead let your brain do the thinking. NEVER just use automatic install (spyware) and never allow for instance outlook to preload crap or preview stuff. Email is for text, not webpages. But mostly ask yourselve WHO is sending me this, and WHY. One of the most amazing attacks I seen was by sending a "joke" attachment to people in your address book. Here is a hint, I am dutch. My brother I
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The only way to know if your operating system has been infected is to be lucky enough to have the bad guys screw up and flood your system with enough bad stuff to affect performance. Even then, plain