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Hackers Serving Rootkits with Bagles
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Mar 31, 2006 06:08 AM
from the worm-in-the-apple dept.
from the worm-in-the-apple dept.
Iran Contra writes "Security researchers at F-Secure in Finland have discovered a rootkit component in the Bagle worm that loads a kernel-mode driver to hide the processes and registry keys of itself and other Bagle-related malware from security scanners. Bagle started out as a simple e-mail borne executable and the addition of rootkit capabilities show how far ahead of the cat-and-mouse game the attackers are."
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Ask Slashdot: A Closed Off System? 177 comments
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Am I wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end, they're just another piece of cut and paste code for script kiddies.
Re:Am I wrong (Score:3, Informative)
It's my personal (and professional) opinion that this is likely to become the norm. I give it another year or two before the majority of malware is all rootkit-based. It's far too easy to incorporate rootkit technology,
Before long... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Before long... (Score:2)
Your joking has revealed an interesting point though - would it be possible to patent rootkit technology now, or some really restrictive DRM, so that when corporations/the government get around to developing software that wants to restrict our every move, it's already been done/patended?
Re:Before long... (Score:2)
I'm sure if you dropped an autoplay.inf file on the root of the drive, Windows could be tricked into executing it.
Re:Before long... (Score:2)
The evolving virus (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The evolving virus (Score:3, Informative)
In fact as far as underlying technology the current viruses have regressed back to simple non-polymorphic code. Not entirely surprising considering that they are written in a high level language nowdays. If you look at the recent crop there is anything including Delphi and VB used to write them with some EXE compression at the end applied to get the size down to a reasonable value.
Re:The evolving virus (Score:5, Interesting)
Evolving computer programs -- not simple genetic algorithms, but programs that actually "thrive" on CPU time and memory, and compete for these resources -- have been already used to experimentally investigate evolution. Note that there is a serious difference between a genetic algorithm and a truly evolving program. In the former case, the fitness function is precisely defined by the programmer. In the latter, the fitness is just what it is in living organisms -- ability to pass on the genes, or code.
Check out the web page -- http://www.msu.edu/~lenski/ [msu.edu] -- of Richard Lenski, experimental evolutionist (bacteria in a test tube + computer), you will find a nice article on in silicio evolution on his web page. The guy has 4 Nature and 2 Science publications only on the topic of digital evolution.
January
j.
Parent
Re:The evolving virus (Score:4, Interesting)
If you allow the code itself to evolve (typically achieved with Lisp or similar cos of the convenient tree structure of the code) then the likelihood is that you can write a better program than will evolve anyway, because so many of the evolved programs are utterly useless. This, of course, is the argument for Intelligent Design, except that the planet really does have unlimited time, and there aren't anti-virus companies constantly trying to sterilise the planet (as far as we know!
Finally, most genetic algorithms require 'sex' type recombination to (randomly and hopefully) whittle away the useless code that has accumulated. This might be a little hard to implement in a cloaking virus - the one thing they don't want is to have any kind of signal that they are there!
All in all, I'll be surprised to see a truly genetic algorithm virus ever. The closest we might see are self tuning ones - eg ones that spot the user is using the machine and back off their spamming activities so that they aren't obvious.
J.
Parent
Re:The evolving virus (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're talking polymorphic characteristics (in viruses or animals), the phrase you're looking for is Heterozygous Advantage [wikipedia.org]. Yes, I do live with a woman who is going to vet school and who has a degree in animal science.
In computer terms, it's going to be hard for random code variations to produce a useful new code segment on their own, for exactly the reasons you describe - there needs to be "sex", or a merging of two codebases, in order to produce surrogate code.
In terms of animals, however, if I may step on my pro-evolution soapbox... This is what all those people at the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis never talk about. The natural tendancy in animals (at least, and probably in other kingdoms) is for the offspring of a non-homogonous pairing to be *better* than either of the parents. No joke, this is the way it works. Not all the time, but more often than not.
For example, my wife is pretty firmly against the homogonization of the beef industry onto black angus for meat and holstein for milk. The reason being, if you breed nothing but black angus to black angus, you're going to get black angus, which is good, but it will never get better than its parents. If you're breeding black angus and charolais, however, the genetic tendancy is that the offspring most of the time will posess the best characteristics of both parents (breeding and birthing ease with black angus, better meat with charolais).
Anyway, I have to go fix a dead UPS.
~Will
Parent
Re:The evolving virus (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd propose a small correction to what you say: the natural tendency of sexual reproduction is to produce creatures that are either (a)inviable, which typically miscarry or (b) similar or (c) better. This would be analogous to receiving two lots of bad code, one of each, or two lots of good code respectively.
AIUI a surprising number of the offspring of higher animals 'spontaneously' abort without the parent necessarily even knowing about it.
Cheers,
Justin.
Re:The evolving virus (Score:5, Insightful)
Changing which registry key a worm modifies, or what files a virus affects will cause wildly varrying effects, 99.9999% of which will cause either no discernable effect, or blue screen the system. This is not a good setup for the GA to figure out what works best.
So despite the similarity in name and function with biological viruses, computer virii (and worms, trojans etc) are not really evolvable, but need to be engineered.
Parent
As seen on their blog page... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As seen on their blog page... (Score:3, Funny)
[Off topic] It's not a worm! (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean the picture, of course: http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicworms.gif [slashdot.org] -- it is an insect larva, not a worm. To be more specific -- probably a butterfly caterpillar.
You want to see a worm? Here -> http://www.desc.med.vu.nl/NL-taxi/ICE/C_elegans1.
January
Mmmmm... bagels! (Score:5, Funny)
"Hackers Serving Rootkits with Bagels"
...and I started to think how cool a hacker café would be... then I got to wondering what else you might be able to order at a hacker café:
Trojan Muffins (secret filling might bring surprise!)
DDoS Donuts (very tasty, but eat too many and they gang up on you)
L33t Latté (quintuple espresso with a single shot of milk)
Keylogger Cakes (be careful, they're watching)
Ah well, as they say in these parts 'ah'll get me coat'...
Re:Mmmmm... bagels! (Score:3, Funny)
DDoS Donuts (very tasty, but eat too many and they gang up on you)
L33t Latté (quintuple espresso with a single shot of milk)
Keylogger Cakes (be careful, they're watching)
I think ThinkGeek just found their newest product line.
Use RootkitRevealer from SysInternals.com. (Score:5, Informative)
In general, any program SysInternals provides is the best in its field, I've found.
Try the just updated (March 7, 2006) version of Autoruns [sysinternals.com] to find nasty stuff running under Windows.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
I blogged Ubuntu LiveCD to explain to noobies (Score:5, Interesting)
My friend is opening up a coffee shop that will have an ap. I will make some copies of Ubuntu for the customers to use.
Now where do I find a dentist for the rootkit I received when I didn't take my own advice
A new taste treat (Score:3, Funny)
Mmm, bagles... (Score:3, Funny)
Rootkits are the new bootsector (Score:3, Insightful)
What we CAN do to relieve this plague is take away the motivation behind viruses. They don't exist just for fun, they serve a purpose.. DDoS is a lucrative racket. If we can somehow make an infected PC less valuable to the attacker, to the point where it's not even worth infecting, the virus threat will slow down to a crawl. Why don't we have more Linux viruses ? Because it's a high-risk, low-potential target. If Microsoft could accomplish the same level of security with the average Windows PC, virus authors would have to go out and get real friggin jobs for once.
Re:All together now... (Score:2)
Polly gets a "Bagle" instead. Polly is annoyed!
Re:How to tell if you are a linux fanatic. (Score:3, Interesting)