Hunting for Botnet Command and Controls 228
Uky writes "Convinced that the recent upswing in virus and Trojan attacks is directly linked to the creation of botnets for nefarious purposes, a group of high-profile security researchers is fighting back, vigilante-style. The objective of the group, which operates on closed, invite-only mailing lists, is to pinpoint and ultimately disable the C&C (command-and-control) infrastructure that sends instructions to millions of zombie drone machines hijacked by malicious hackers." From the article: "Using data from IP flows passing through routers and reverse-engineering tools to peek under the hood of new Trojans, Thompson said the researchers are able to figure out how the botnet owner sends instructions to the compromised machines."
Botnet (Score:3, Funny)
Easy way to catch them. (Score:3, Insightful)
To inflate user counts, just get an ircd that allows assigning yourself or others fake hostnames (for certain hosts/etc). Then load tons of bots in channels pretending to be 'users'. You could even get creative and make them idely chatter with each other..
Anyways, the point is that most of these botnet peoples eventually want to take a part of their net out to go mess with irc channels, and they usually seem to target smaller networks on the top of whatever list they're using.. So all ya gotta do if just log massive joins into certain channels, or when a flood of users magically connect to your fake network.. Then you have tons of bots to dissect or whatever.
Re:Easy way to catch them. (Score:2, Informative)
It's the dissecting and cleaning part that's hard, and getting harder and harder as kiddies are getting "smarter".
Re:Easy way to catch them. (Score:3, Informative)
Modern spam zombies use p2p network to send messages back and forth, they aren't controlled from centralized irc servers anymore.
The article discusses decoding the control messages sent between the bots in their own network, and how to take control of them, and possibly shutting them down.
Re:Easy way to catch them. (Score:3, Informative)
That's exceedingly hard to get working properly, which is probably why it's still not a very common behaviour. In my experience, most of the botnets still seem to be controlled by a central IRC server, albeit they tend to use hacked up ircds that provide only the minimal functionality required (with little in the way of informational messages), making it hard to get much inf
Re:Easy way to catch them. (Score:2, Funny)
I... kinda feel someone already did this. It would explain the behavior in some irc networks.
Re:Easy way to catch them. (Score:2)
You mean kinda like /. ? ;-)
Re:Easy way to catch them. (Score:2)
Re:Easy way to catch them. (Score:3, Informative)
C&C attacks work well for military (Score:2, Interesting)
C&C attacks are the staple of today's military. An organized, centralized effort should do wonders for laying waste to the economic value (and motivation) behind such behavior.
Re:C&C attacks work well for military (Score:5, Funny)
The best way to lay waste to someone's economic power in C&C is to destroy their harvesters. Make sure not to send infantry units because they'll suffer tiberium poisoning, or merely be run over by the harvester. Another great way to wreak havoc is to send the engineer into the harvesting facility as the harvester is unloading, you'll get the building, harvester and the tiberium thats being unloaded at the time. Of course, many believe engineering cheese is the cheap way to play C&C, but of course there are too many cheesy plays to count in that game. I suggest you play something like Starcraft. Or Starcraft2, which I have a chance of actually helping with.
Re:C&C attacks work well for military (Score:2)
I play Civilization II (yes, I am old, deal with it) and the computer players are easily fooled - don't place cities where the best resources are, place them on mountains with resources at their backs and the provoke, provoke, provoke - war costs nothing from a mountain top until armor is developed.
Re:C&C attacks work well for military (Score:2, Insightful)
The computers that form the botnet are still compromised and are still just as dangerous. If they have a hard-coded IP address to receive instructions from the vigilantes can make sure that IP address doesn't issue instructions but if the instructions are received in a less centralised way then I can't see how they could stop t
Re:C&C attacks work well for military (Score:3, Informative)
Re:C&C attacks work well for military (Score:2)
Command and control strikes work well against nation states. YMMV on transnational terror organizations and ideologically motivated guerilla movements. Happy? I am, after all, just astroturfing my domain auction anyway
Violation of My Privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
When the security "experts" are busy looking at all the data passing through routers, who is busy ensuring that the "experts" will not violate my privacy by reading the personal but sensitive e-mail notes that I send to my friends and associates?
In other words, when the "experts" are protecting me from the hackers, who is protecting me from the "experts"?
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
You, by encrypting them.
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
I get it. It's like GNU, if someone is doing something you don't like, they're anti-social.
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:4, Informative)
Mostly the volume of data involved is so large that trying to monitor it without filtering for the items of interest is usually impossible. And that filter is your best defense, in this particular situation.
Unless, of course, you're sending Aunt Martha that e-mail over IRC....
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Look (Score:2)
Re:Look (Score:2)
Re:Look (Score:2)
Re:Look (Score:2)
Re:Look (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:4, Informative)
So you can put the gun down- your privacy is safe.
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2, Insightful)
However, when you click SEND from whatever email client you use, you are essentially flinging a postcard out of your 10th story window.
Said postcard contains:
_
_
If you are truly concerned about some "expert" taking the time to read whatever it is that you have to say to a friend, or associate, then you shoul
Are you talking about cocks, balls, and vaginas? (Score:2)
Seriously, you need to protect yourself. Don't depend on others to protect you while you're on the Internet. That's why you do certain things like not running Windows, run a solid, well-tested Linux or *BSD firewall, and practice encryption of all of your communication. The power of the Internet includes many responsibilities: one of those responsibilities is to ensure
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:4, Funny)
I've owned a couple of ISPs and I currently do service for a regional provider. If I cared to look I could see everything - your best defense is the same reason that you don't get dates - what you do is just not that interesting to anyone else.
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Wish I could mod this "a little too close to home."
*grin*
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
I learned some years ago that church goin' Iowa corn farmers will have subscriptions to chickswithdicks.com. You see that, you convince yourself you're not seeing things, and then
The boredom comment was as much of a dig as the real truth, I'm not joking even a little bit when I say I don't want to know what turns other people on
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is drifting off topic, but I am coming to feel you hinted at something fairly interesting to bring up. Big Windows networks are boring, to the point where it's uninteresting to hack them and/or 'dig around' to see what's there.
At my last job, the network was a big old-school conglomerate. There were Solaris, Netware, OS2 Warp (!), and Windows NT servers all mixed together on a s
Netflows != sniffing packets (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Me. I use data from IP flows passing through routers to reverse-engineer their closed, invite-only mailing lists, to ensure they're not snooping on anyone's e-mail.
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:2)
Obviously not.
Re:Violation of My Privacy? (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry. Your personal email wasn't that interesting.
pessimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:pessimistic (Score:2, Insightful)
What do I mean? Well, we all know that there are plenty of good, free security tools out there, from antivirus programs, antispyware programs, and firewalls. CDs are dirt cheap, and every person reading this probably has a few hundred lying around. Everyone
Shutting down botnets is a pointless effort.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The only solution is secure software engineering and prompt, reliable patching.
Re:Shutting down botnets is a pointless effort.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately that's not a very good solution. While creating more secure software from the ground up is definately thew ay to go for the future you have to have some plan to deal with the current problems. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people aren't going to upgrade to the latest and greatest OS, web browser, or whatever if thier existing one works. So even after you've got more secure computing solutions out there you have to convince people it's worth the time and more specifically, cost, of upgrading.
Re:Shutting down botnets is a pointless effort.. (Score:2)
OR use the botnet command and control centre to command the bots to upgrade themselves...
Just make sure to use the CONTROL centre and not the KAOS one.
Re:Shutting down botnets is a pointless effort.. (Score:2)
All they are doing is shutting down a rogue IRC channel. The boss merely has to switch to a new one. It probably takes about 5 seconds of effort.
But they have to do something.
Re:Shutting down botnets is a pointless effort.. (Score:2)
Personally, I'm in favour of some sort of simple built-in software DRM that by default only lets 'certified' executables run, and obviously can be turned off by people who know what they're doing.
Re:Shutting down botnets is a pointless effort.. (Score:2)
Re:Shutting down botnets is a pointless effort.. (Score:2)
As such doesn't really exist, I fail to see how you make the blanket statement that some potential future system will be too restrictive and/or annoying for your typical user...
kudos (Score:2)
Re:kudos (Score:3, Insightful)
The moment one of these BotNet's decides to DDOS the servers at the capitol building or start attacking other aspects of the US internet infrastructure, your congressman isn't going to give a shit.
The internet and the laws governing it are the wildwest at the moment. Some corners have very strong laws, other corners have none. However, if I remember it was the vigilantes who took care of the areas that strong law hadn't come int
Re:kudos (Score:2)
I can only imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth that you'd hear from the
Told Ya So (Score:2, Interesting)
Self destruct the botnets? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Self destruct the botnets? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Self destruct the botnets? (Score:2)
That thought has crossed my mind on several occasions when some bot on my local segment has been hammering my firewall and a quick NMAP reveals that, big surprise, NetBIOS and RPC are wide open. The price you pay for connecting via an ISP that doesn't treat their customers like idiots, even though some of them quite obviously are... So far, I've managed to resist the temptation, but boy, is it ever gett
Re:Self destruct the botnets? (Score:3, Interesting)
Some drones have builtin uninstall commands, others have commands to download and execute programs, so cleaners are written.
But the drones are getting more and more advanced, builtin uninstall commands are getting more rare... it is clearly a battle that can not be won if only fought this way.
Re:Self destruct the botnets? (Score:2)
What causes botnets? (Score:2, Interesting)
These end users just *don't care*. Because, although their owned boxen are f-ing with the rest of the internet, it doesn't affect them - a selfish luser attitude, why should they bother virus/trojan scanning their boxen?
I wish ISPs would hold the lusers (criminally) responsible for t
Re:What causes botnets? (Score:2)
It'd be a great OSS project and a great firefox plugin!!
Re:What causes botnets? (Score:3, Insightful)
You want to throw my mother in the slammer?
You're not nice at all.
Re:What causes botnets? (Score:2)
however, it should be treated the same as a minor traffic offense. you don't secure your computer and your isp catches you? you have to take a computer proficiency class.
Re:What causes botnets? (Score:3, Insightful)
Joe Sixpack doesn't consider it "irresponsible" to connect his machine to the net without a firewall. Infact he probably doesn't even know what a firewall is.
If you're looking for someone to blame, look no further than Microsoft for having everyone run as admin and leaving several easily-exploitable ports open by default on every version of Windows up to XP SP2.
By the way just as a reminder - botnets originally entered the limelight after scriptkiddies on IRC networks star
Good for them. (Score:5, Interesting)
a group of high-profile security researchers is fighting back, vigilante-style.
This emotionally laden language has been deliberately chosen to make it sound like this activty is a "bad thing [tm]"
I truly believe it is the duty of every person to fight against clearly evil activity.
This includes a mugger hitting an old lady, a middle age man trying to drag a pre-teen girl (or boy) in to a car idiling in the street, and a person trying to kick in the door of the elderly couple down the street.
If the people disabling bot-nets make every effort to be certain they do not harm innocent or uninvolved people (and the standard here is very high), then they are doing a public service. (if they take the attitude, like some "anti-spam" people, of -> 'kill them all, let God sort them out, they are just assholes with very, very small peckers')
Those who believe the gub'mint is going to be johnny on the spot to fix all your boo-boos are sadly misguided: there is neither the manpower or the reaction time to fix everything "bad" in the world. That depends on YOU.
Re:Good for them. (Score:2)
Re:Good for them. (Score:3, Insightful)
More: There is no law against that.
Roper: There is! God's law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Roper: Sophistication upon sophistication.
More: No, sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the law. I know what's legal not what's right. And I'll stick to what's legal.
Roper: Then you set man's law above God's!
More: No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact - I'm not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which yo
A more effective approach? (Score:2)
But if instead you tell all his bots to wipe themselves out, he's got to buy new ones. Yes those machines will surely get reinfected within a few days/weeks, but it will throw a much bigger wrench in the works.
How is this
Re:A more effective approach? (Score:3, Informative)
1. Its more code weight, harder to transport, run, and create.
2. The bot virus writers have probably read the villiany HOWTO which advises against installing a self-destruct device because invariably the hero will use it as a very easy means to destroy the superweapon.
Re:A more effective approach? (Score:2)
Bot flexibility is presumably valuable, giving their owners the ability to upgrade them in unforseen ways.
Re:A more effective approach? (Score:3, Interesting)
As soon as you find the magic word to make the bots respond to you (which can be difficult at times, some of the malware writers are pretty sneaky) shutting a botnet down can be as simple as logging into the irc server and appropriate channel an
I hope they invite the DShield guy (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently the attacker about crapped his drawers when instead of the usual bot replies to his commands an actual person started talking to him in his IRC channel.
http://dshield.org/ [dshield.org]
Re:I hope they invite the DShield guy (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think that the security community has a unanimously high opinion of Steve Gibson: see http://www.grcsucks.com/ [grcsucks.com] for a counter-point.
Gibson is certainly a gifted self-publicist, but Ill leave others more qualified to comment on whether he is a good security consultant...
Re:I hope they invite the DShield guy (Score:2)
Steve's no idiot, but he does have quite an ego. He brags that he writes his little GUI tools (which do little more than make a few API calls) in "pure assembly". Why? I have no idea. It was amusing when he reinvented SYN cookies...
The new superheroes...(whats their name?) (Score:5, Funny)
Now if they could just have a cool name, we could have a new hit superheroes movie for this summer.
Any suggestion anyone ?
- The League of Net Shadows
- The League of Extraordinay Nerds
- The Fantastic Fourty
Come on give me something better
Re:The new superheroes...(whats their name?) (Score:2)
That's kinda cool, but I'm sure somebody can do better.
Re:The new superheroes...(whats their name?) (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, the need to acknowledge both genders would probably make Active X-Force or Active X-Factor a better choice.
Re:The new superheroes...(whats their name?) (Score:2)
No no no. We need to give the nutters something to worry and fret about.
I propose we call them "The Internet Cabal", or "The Cabal" for short.
.
Re:The new superheroes...(whats their name?) (Score:2, Funny)
The Red Shirt Gang?
What's good for the goose... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be interested to see how many people in
Re:What's good for the goose... (Score:2)
Um, it's not a government body?
Boring stuff like they can be charged with crimes, you can sue the group, etc.
Re:What's good for the goose... (Score:3, Informative)
This is nothing like a Star Chamber -- The little script kiddies aren't being rounded up and killed (although maybe that'd send a nice message).
I'm just kicking them off my DNS network and when I can alert the ISPs of infected zombies and C&Cs then all the better. When there is information to hand over to LE then I try to do that. A lot of this abuse now deals with phishing and other financially driven motives and so having a strong working relationship with LE is essential. Vigilantes don't have
C&C? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only sollution is user education.
User education! Hah! (Score:2)
You obviously don't have anything to do with end user support in your line of work. I've got the same people asking the same questions all the time. They don't want to be bothered to learn how to do anything on a computer other than the absolute minimum knowledge they need to get things done for work or school. There are millions of people out there who don't know anything more than how to turn their computers on and off, and use the basic features of Word, IE, and Outl
Re:C&C? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but there'll be one trojan per botnet. Script kiddies don't like to share, and in fact the current trend is supposedly groups assembling botnets and then auctioning off their services to spammers. Given that, you can see why the botnet "owner" wouldn't want to allow access to other evildoers.
Re:C&C? (Score:2)
We're doomed.
Typical freeloaders (Score:4, Funny)
This is a blatant violation of the trojans' EULAs if I ever saw one. The authors put a lot of work into writing those trojans. What gives "security researchers" such a sense of entitlement to that code? If they want to analyze malware, they should write their own!
Anti-anti-botnet (Score:3, Informative)
If I were a Blackhat, my counter to this would be to have the members of the botnet relay my commands among themselves like a telephone relay tree where one person calls 5 who each then call 5 who each then ... To find Mr. Big, you'd have to find the headwaters of the stream, which would be a difficult task.
Re:Anti-anti-botnet (Score:4, Interesting)
Controlling it is then a matter of keysigned commands. All commands are timestamped to be unique(so you can easily discard duplicate messages), and is verified with the public key. The only way you can be exposed at the leader is if you get caught with the private key.
New spin on... (Score:2)
Not a problem for long... (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not into botnets anymore, but like most here prolly', I started my internet life on irc. And anyone else who grew up on non dalnet like servers with chan services knows that being on a network without them can be a pain. Especially when smacktards show up for the day
Anyways, knowing a bit about bot's and botnets, I would say that it shouldnt be too hard to take some down. Being irc based, plain text would be one problem. But if you have access to a machine infected, encryption would be pointless since you could just debug the program and find out what it 's protocol is anyways. I think one big issue that was hinted at in one of the above posts was that you should be able to use an infected machine to "take over" the botnet. Well, things dont work that way. For those of you that havent run one or used one before, I will give you a rough idea of what the ones in my day (1.1.15 or so IIRC).
A botnet is basically a shell like environment similar to say a bash shell or a dos prompt. ie: its all text commands using plain ol' ascii. Commands generally start with a ".", like ".help". The botnet also has security systems in place (ie: users with passwords etc) that define who can dcc chat the bot directly, use its !channel commands on irc etc. The eggdrop (sorry, yes, im refering to eggdrop's specifically) bot also has the ability to link multiple bots togethere to form a big "botnet". The is all of course done with special bot accounts with unique passwords.
The reason you cant just take one over (despite it probably being a modified version of this system of bot), is because the other bots are probably only allowed to "take orders" from a specific machine or user. Although for simiplicity sake, I would imagine its just a user and password combo to prevent any traceable information from being gleamed over the botnet traffic. Dont forget to that the botnet would be point to point and most of the traffic would only be coming from a single location (which you would have to find out from a comprimised machine).
In the end, I see the biggest problem in finding the zombies being, how do you tell when a machines infected if the virus tries the best it can to hide itself from non-forensic integrity checking tools. But, over the years I can see software taking a turn to being better checked for authenticity and integrity etc. Once we hit that point, botnets would probably start to disappear. Also consider that the machines themselevs will go offline and be replaced by newer ones that arent suceptable to the same malicious code. This at least forces them to keep active. And keeping them active helps you trace them.
Anyways, hope you had a fun read. Not worth previewing this one, l8r.
How my botnet would work. (Score:4, Insightful)
The bots would be connected to their own P2P-ish system. Commands would be passed around the network in a method similar to searches in Gnutella.
All commands would by signed by my private key. My bots would all have my public key. This, I would be *the only person* who could issue valid commands to my botnet.
This would make it impossible to tell where the commands are coming from since the originator would look just like another bot on the network.
Re:Who cares really (Score:3, Insightful)
What you're saying shows the root of the problem and why it's so hard to solve: you need some level of cooperation from people who do not have a direct interest in solving it simply because it doesn't affect them. Sure, your little 56k is quite harmless, but with 1000 zombies on little 56 lines, you can create quite a flood.
The other problem is with using up bandwidth allotments. Let's say the attacker is us
Re:Who cares really (Score:3, Informative)
Most 'normal' users really don't seem to give a damn if their computeris being hijacked, as long as they don't notice it. And the same users won't undertand that their 56k line is one of many, which adds up to an enormous amount of bandwidth.
Who cares? Nobody. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who cares? Nobody. (Score:2)
Re:Why allow IRC? (Score:4, Informative)
So just port filtering doesn't work. The next idea is to do stateful packet inspection. Every router looks at the contents of every packet to determine if it is part of the IRC protocol.
Ok, this would work, except it would be unacceptably expensive to implement. Plus, I beleive that some (most? all?) IRC servers support SSL and possibly IPSEC. So the packets are encrypted using SSL, and using some non-obvious port. (like say, port 443) At this point, it is very hard to distinguish between legitimate HTTPS traffic and IRC traffic. I suppose you could look at the packet sizes and do traffic analysis on the flows, but you'd still have problems with other legitimate services running over HTTPS. (Like VPN proxies or Java Applets, or Flash)
So, even if IRC is the root of all evil in the world, it's not possible to just "not allow" it.
(Sorry for the rant, I'm getting over being sick and still a bit punchy)