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Researchers Hijack Storm Worm To Track Profits
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Nov 08, 2008 10:14 AM
from the storm-chasers dept.
from the storm-chasers dept.
An anonymous reader points out a story in the Washington Post, which begins:
"A single response from 12 million e-mails is all it takes for spammers to turn annual profits of millions of dollars promoting knockoff pharmaceuticals, according to an unprecedented new study on the economics of spam. Over a period of about a month in the Spring of 2008, researchers at the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley sought to measure the conversion rate of spam by quietly infiltrating the Storm worm botnet, a vast collection of compromised computers once responsible for sending an estimated 20 percent of all spam."
The academic paper (PDF) is also available. We've previously discussed another group of researchers who were able to infiltrate the botnet for a different purpose.
Related Stories
[+]
Researchers Infiltrate and 'Pollute' Storm Botnet 261 comments
ancientribe writes "Dark Reading reports that a group of European researchers has found a way to disrupt the massive Storm botnet by infiltrating it and injecting "polluted" content into it to disrupt communication among the bots and their controlling hosts. Other researchers have historically shied way from this controversial method because they don't "want to mess with other peoples' PCs by injecting commands," said one botnet expert quoted in the article.
Submission: Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits by Anonymous Coward
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Double standards? (Score:5, Interesting)
How come they don't track down the IP addresses of infected computers and inform the users their computer is compromised? It seems these researchers also are getting a kick out of the botnet at the cost of the victims.
Re:Double standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Which leaves two possible solutions. (Score:4, Insightful)
#1. The ISP blocks all outgoing port 25 connections. We've been over this one before. It means more expenses for the ISP so they're not going to do it unless they are forced to do it through law.
#2. The vigilante approach of writing a "virus" that identifies and infects infected computers ... and then removes the existing infection, downloads updates, installs a silent anti-virus app and checks back in at regular intervals for updates. The problem with that is that the people who do it become "criminals" under US law.
Parent
Re:Which leaves two possible solutions. (Score:4, Insightful)
I wondered about #1, also. My ISP blocks *inbound* port 25 but not outbound. They don't want to let me run a server on a dynamic home IP address because they want to charge me for a business use. They also block inbound port 80.
It turns out the reason they don't block outbound 25 is because that would force the spammers to email out through the ISP mail servers which would get them blacklisted. They are fine with letting the home users send spam and get blacklisted. It doesn't cost them anything.
Parent
Re:Which leaves two possible solutions. (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't they get blacklisted if a users IP is attached to a block assigned to that ISP?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
My ISP, Cable One, does in fact block outbound port 25. Makes it hard to test remote mail servers. :(
But they do allow inbound port 25, so I can run my own mail server and just set their SMTP server as a smarthost in my own postfix config.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Double standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine this scenario:
You have Bob. Bob has a thing about catching STDs. No matter how many times he gets cleaned up, he turns around and does something stupid and gets a new one, and in turn passes them on.
Is it unethical to study his infections? The subject won't stop getting the infections, nor will he stop spreading them. However, we can use what we learn from studying the subject further on down the line.
Not quite so black and white is it? I side with the researchers. The botnet will be there either way, and if we actively destroy it a new one will be made in it's place (and possibly improved, preventing study). Might as well learn what we can from it before making a move.
Parent
You might be infected if ... (Score:2)
Files in Windows System folder:
wincom32.sys
peers.ini
wincom32.ini
Registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wincom32
Re:Double standards? (Score:5, Funny)
Or they could change the worm to format hard disks on infected machines -- once done, a PC cannot send spam till reinstall. And this time, the user will be a bit more careful about PC security.
Problemo solved!
Parent
Re:Double standards? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe someone should introduce some inconviniance for spam infected bandwitch usage (i.e. charge money for the potnet traffic)? If people have to pay for compromized systems, then maybe they will get up their ass*s. Just a thought.
And yes, I know, the idea must be elaborated and gives a whole set of new issues.. Just ment as starting point for a discussion.
Parent
Re:Double standards? (Score:4, Interesting)
It sure is a point that back in the day, the end user was really inconvenienced by viruses. Internet didn't exist yet for end-users, and software was transfered by floppy or over BBSes. Spamming hadn't been invented.
The first virus I encountered was relatively benign: displaying fake cursors on your screen, something like that. Irritating enough to realise you're infected and figure out what's wrong and doing something about it.
At the time many viruses were also designed to wipe/corrupt data - something that keeps you on the edge. That risk is much more direct, and much more costly that a slightly slower computer that tries to send out a lot of e-mail.
Nowadays I do have to admit being less concerned about these viruses, except where it comes to keyloggers and so. That want to steal your banking data. However considering the profilation of fishing (recently I get dozens of mails for "update your Google AdWords payment information") even that seems to be a low risk issue.
Besides I'm not using Windows... OS/X and Linux only... and I know not to click on links in spam, and browsing with non-IE browsers blocks 99.9% of the drive-by downloads but not all: I have got some requests for where to save a .exe file to; automatic download function. At least not hidden.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The best they could really do with the addresses would be to track down the ISPs of the users. The ISPs would then be faced with spending time (== money) to link an IP and time-window to an actual user, and then inform that user.
Their reward for this effort would be to have one of their technical support people spend an hour on the phone explaining to a clueless and scared someone that they needed to reinstall their XP & applications. This, they ultimately would not do.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
How about some countermesures? I mean, if they can infiltrate the botnet, then is it not possible to track it's traffic? I mean, if the ISP's would do that, then they could block it (the control packages) and the spam clients may loose the spam to send out and idle around?
Well, they probaby also must replicate and send a "Shut up" command to the clients.
Messing with the users is mostly bad (no
Much better solution (Score:2)
Zap the partition table.
Re: (Score:2)
As some smart, responsible and otherwise nice people learned the hard way, one of the possible outcomes of reporting a security issue to the affected entity is being sued for illegal activity, reported to the feds etc. by the said entity. After reading some of these horror stories (and seeing no change in the trend over the last decades), I can say for myself that the only situation where I would report a security issue is to my employer since this is, well, my duty as a loyal employee. Or to a "known sane"
Re: (Score:2)
How come they don't track down the IP addresses of infected computers and inform the users their computer is compromised? It seems these researchers also are getting a kick out of the botnet at the cost of the victims.
I think that would have been a responsible end to the study, but there was no mention in their paper of a "cleanup" phase. They did, however, take great care to follow an ethical code and "strictly reduce harm". To them, that meant: do not send victims actual malware, do not send victims to actual spammer sites, and do not collect credit card information. The spammers' victims were never "worse off" for having participated in the campaign.
Of course, contacting these people saying "you were identified
Re: (Score:2)
Spam protection (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't have any data to back this up, but it seems to me that people are migrating from small provider companies to big internet provider companies - and their e-mail is going together. And it also seems to me that all those big companies have good e-mail filters (or they're getting one that will be good in a small period of time). If that's true, spam will face a dead end pretty soon.
Even if you stay with a small provider company with your personal e-mail, there are many good solutions to avoid spam. I used Popfile [getpopfile.org] for a long time and it worked pretty well.
Either way, if people will go to their spam box and click that viagra ad, it will be their problem. It doesn't affect me anymore.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
that's a good point. i'm guessing part of the reason why Gmail has such a good spam filter is because they implement collective filtering by allowing users to easily mark spam messages, and also because with such a large user-base they can implement statistical filtering techniques much more effectively.
what i don't get is why ISPs big and small don't just cooperate with each other and trade/pool information needed to fight spam. it would improve everyone's quality of service, so why not work together to ac
Storm Worm (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, Spam... right.
When I first read the title, I was thinking more along the lines of:
Bless the Maker and His water.
Bless the coming and going of Him,
may His passage cleanse the world,
may He keep the world for His people.
-- Frank Herbert
Re: (Score:2)
May the maker produce a spiced canned meat
Bless the coming of him and curse his going for it is unpleasant
the vigilante approach (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize this will either be wildly popular with you or you'll hate it, but what I'd like to see someone do is infiltrate the botnet somehow (either by vulnerability or crack their key or whatever) and send a command to the herd to zero the boot sector and shut down their host. (the zombies, not the herder's machines)
Nothing enough to cause data loss, but enough to force the naive owners to take their machines to someone to get them fixed/cleaned up. I'm tired of being a victim of computer neglect en masse.
Not saying there's just one botnet out there, so I'd be greatly entertained to see them fall one by one. Should make a nice spectacle. Wouldn't it be entertaining to get up tomorrow and read front page stories all over the place the likes of which we got with Code Red, that a sizeable chunk of zombies just dropped off the grid and there were long lines at the PC repair shops this morning? Stories of entire businesses being brought to a halt because 95% of the machines in their office were owned? Sorry, but "serves them right", and thank you have a nice day while I go check my mail and see 80% fewer medications for sale.
Re:the vigilante approach (Score:4, Interesting)
No need to zero the boot sector, just pop-up a window that says "you have been infected by the Storm worm" every two minutes. The machine is still functional so it is easier to fix, but recovery is easier and less likely to result in data loss.
(This all is based on the assumption that doing so would be ethical which I don't think it is, but thought experiments don't hurt.)
Parent
Re:the vigilante approach (Score:4, Insightful)
And so next time when malware like that damn Antivirus 2009 trojan is installed, they'll be more likely to follow the instructions: "Your computer is infected, click here to scan your computer."
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Either is likely to result in data loss. Most people do not have the resources or the knowledge to handle a virus not caught by their scanner. And of the handful of technical support providers who support the software at all, I don't know any who will help with viruses beyond wiping and starting over.
Re:the vigilante approach (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is most of them are "fast flux" - the C&C servers move around daily. There's no stationary target to hit. Even if you go after a host channel somewhere etc, they just move to a different IP and change domain name records.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
All that will do is get law enforcement after the vigilantes. Law enforcement is much more concerned with effective competition than they are with ordinary lawbreakers, so they won't stop bot
Remove the tcpip stack (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider it a form of quarantine.
Parent
Because of stealing (Score:2)
Only because the botnet operators steal resources in such a large manner they can turn a "profit". Whatever that may be. How do you calculate a script kiddies costs anyways?
The much more interesting information was the US$ 2700 for about 350 Million Spam messages received and (an estimated) four times as much sent.
Rounded up that is a dollar earned for every 10 Million messages received and 40 Million messages sent (and caught as spam early on). Not counting that: "Still, the researchers acknowledge their f
I've previously been ridiculed for (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So far it's hard to pay random people on the internet. For instance if I want to pay you USD1, it'll cost me more than USD1 in time and money to do so.
Re: (Score:2)
Bass Fisher Extreme should monitor the bounced/spam-tagged emails on their list to stop sending them to these people.
Total cost: 1 cent per Joe Dumbass user. And if micropayments exist to do that, then they also exist to require micropayments from subscribers. At 1 email per week, it cost someone 52 cents per year to receive the newsletter, which is half the 99 cents threshold for impulse purchases.
Re: (Score:2)
Ethics of the study (Score:4, Insightful)
the researchers seem to take the legality of their actions under serious consideration. From TFA:
"Measurement Ethics:
We have been careful to design experiments that we believe are both consistent with current U.S. legal doctrine and are fundamentally ethical as well. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to fully describe the complex legal landscape in which active security measurements operate, we believe the ethical basis for our work is far easier to explain: we strictly reduce harm. First, our instrumented proxy bots do not create any new harm. That is, absent our involvement, the same set of users would receive the same set of spam e-mails sent by the same worker bots. Storm is a large self-organizing system and when a proxy fails its worker bots automatically switch to other idle proxies (indeed, when our proxies fail we see workers quickly switch away). Second, our proxies are passive actors and do not themselves engage in any behavior that is intrinsically objectionable; they do not send spam e-mail, they do not compromise hosts, nor do they even contact worker bots asynchronously. Indeed, their only function is to provide a conduit between worker bots making requests and master servers providing responses. Finally, where we do modify C&C messages in transit, these actions themselves strictly reduce harm. Users who click on spam altered by these changes will be directed to one of our innocuous doppelganger Web sites. Unlike the sites normally advertised
by Storm, our sites do not infect users with malware and do not collect user credit card information. Thus, no user should receive more
spam due to our involvement, but some users will receive spam that is less dangerous that it would otherwise be."
However, their premise of "reducing harm" is questionable. How can we be sure that a person who decided to purchase these drugs (against all warnings) really believes that not buying them is the best thing for him? What if this person really wants to purchase a drug that he thinks will enlarge him? Who gives the researchers the right to decide what other people should spend their money on? Under several legal interpretations, forcing a person not to buy something perceived as harmful is not legal: denying to sell cigarettes to a person of legal age may be illegal, under discrimination laws.
The bottom line is that the researchers have a good point regarding the ethics of their study, however this issue is not 100% resolved.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
However, their premise of "reducing harm" is questionable. How can we be sure that a person who decided to purchase these drugs (against all warnings) really believes that not buying them is the best thing for him? What if this person really wants to purchase a drug that he thinks will enlarge him? Who gives the researchers the right to decide what other people should spend their money on? Under several legal interpretations, forcing a person not to buy something perceived as harmful is not legal: denying to sell cigarettes to a person of legal age may be illegal, under discrimination laws.
The site that the spam normally points to actually sends placebos or mislabled painkillers instead of the actual drugs, so I don't think this is really an ethical issue. However, even if the site did send the real drugs, it is *not* difficult to find an alternative website willing to sell the same items. Not to mention the fact that the sending of the spam was illegal in the first place.
how to get suggestive phrases into a journal. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:HMM... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:HMM... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
oh wait...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Damn it! You're right.
Out of all the spam I've gotten in recent years, I've only got 1 from a Russian bride-to-be:
Hello! My name is Nataliya, me of 26 years, I the intellectual, nice, sexual girl which at present searches for serious attitudes - I shall tell more search for the man for marriage!
I only, that have read through your questionnaire and it has very much interested me, I wish to continue to learn you.
So we can have dialogue!
Please reply only my personal e-mail: iriska640@yahoo.com
I look forward
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Suggest an improvement?
Make them write lines.
No, before you roll your eyes so hard you sprain something, hear me out.
Try to get an estimate for how prolific this particular spammer is, and then make them legibly write out every e-mail they have ever sent by hand, using crappy 5 cent pens that splutter and run dry frequently.
They get released when they're done.
Re:HMM... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I'd rather they be made to pick up a piece of litter for every spam email they sent, or some other such public service that equates piece for piece to the amount of spam they have sent.
Repaint a house for someone = 100 spam messages
Clean up a city block of litter = 100 spam messages
Well you get the point. Force them to wear bright yellow spandex jumpsuits with the spam logo on it until they have fully atoned.
Whatever the punishment, it should be public, and only mildly degrading.
Something that lets us all remember what they did, and what it costs in reparations.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The way I read it, they only need one response for every 12 million emails that they send. They send many more than that and they might get more than the one response per 12 million necessary to make a profit. It's more a testimony to the low cost of sending those 12 million emails.
Re: (Score:2)
No. If you send 12 million emails, you can expect to get one order for $100 pills. To sell a million dollars worth of product, you would have to send 120 billion emails.
Re: (Score:2)
That however does nothing to rehabilitate the spammer nor does it prevent relapse (See Spamford Wallace). I propose that we go directly to the death penalty and kill two birds with one stone.
The spammers aren't using their own machines. (Score:2)
So your plan would result in Joe Sixpack getting a bill for email that he claims he didn't send.
And he would be correct. He would not have sent it. His machine would have. While it was a zombie.