Chinese Hackers Waking up to Malware

An anonymous reader writes "An increase in malware originating from China has not gone unnoticed by security researchers, according to the site ITWeek. The aggravating software has been increasing over the last three months, to the point where some unlucky persons may be getting some every day. Individuals interviewed for the article are seeing an increasing sophistication and independent use of rootkits, new to the Chinese malware scene. 'China has traditionally been a hotbed of password stealers who go after log-in names and passwords for online games such as World of Warcraft. The criminals are after virtual currencies and goods which can be sold on auction websites.' These new types of software are actually encrypted, and can prove hard to dismantle."

National Security Nightmare?

Maybe the sony rootkit was a front to steal national secrets?

Hacked By Chinese!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_worm [wikipedia.org]

Pretty cool stuff, actually

This article is interesting because a) I've seen it firsthand this past week, and b) Some of these are actually very sophisticated attacks.

One of our buildings was going through an antivirus upgrade over AD when it got hit. Every machine in the building was getting an iframe in the web browser from some Chinese ISP (usa.d3a.us) that would bracket the computers web browsing session throughout its duration. The iframe contained javascript designed to capture passwords from gmail and other public websites, in essence a browser-based keylogger. Of course, blocking the offending domains through our filter got rid of the iframe, but it still affected websites because now they all had broken source code (wonderful XML render errors on just about every website, including google).

Then the hunt was on.

The 'sophistication' I witnessed comes from the fact that no matter how many of these boxes we cleaned and patched, the iframe source code kept popping up everywhere. I ran a Wireshark on it and discovered something rather interesting (to me anyways). The software was attacking the router's ARP table, by feeding it a bogus mac address (one of the infected machines) in essence redirecting all network traffic to a software-based proxy. Tracking down machines via MAC address and patching them eventually resolved the issue long enough to update the antivirus on the network, but I left the place somewhat in awe of what I had just seen, having most of my network antivirus experience involve easily blockable/patchable worms and viruses.

While an ARP attack isn't all that uncommon, the presence of Chinese characters on every infected machine was a dead giveaway. Not exactly something I'd ever seen from a country more historically known for installing local keyloggers to steal WoW accounts.

But or a good hour or two, I was getting my ass handed to me, and I had to completely disconnect the building from the WAN. In addition, our AV (very big-name corporate AV firm), didn't do shit on it. After the update I had to submit samples to the AV company to get a permanent patch upstream.

That's still local.

The MAC address and ARP broadcasts are only used for local delivery. Some machine on that local segment had to have already been cracked.

There was a cracked machine sitting inside your firewall and broadcasting on your internal network.

How it was cracked is the first issue.

Using it as a proxy is just weird. It would be more efficient and effective to use it to scan other machines to see if they're vulnerable and to run attacks on your administrator passwords.

Better yet, upload the BIOS info and see if a rootkit can be installed on the motherboard.

It is a strange attack because it doesn't match any of the standard reasons for attacking.

#1. Bandwidth - this for for spam and DDoS attacks.
      1a. Crack one machine and upload the address book and anything that appears to be an email address so infected emails can be sent to those addresses.
      1b. Crack one machine and scan that range to see if any other machines are vulnerable.

#2. Information - compromise one machine / router / whatever and use that to attack important internal machines via worms or password attacks.

The attack you describe is just ... weird. Why attempt to compromise multiple workstations via an outside site? That is too easily noticed. Suddenly all of your workstations are hitting this one site? That's a huge flag in the logs. Even if you hadn't noticed it on the workstations.

And they wouldn't get any more bandwidth from the attack (case #1) nor would they get information that wasn't more easily available (and less noticeable) via other routes (case #2).

It will be short lived

This subject is worthy of a book, however, I'll try to convey some level 5 thoughts and hopefully it'll make sense:

The Chinese government will reign in the criminal elements. They can't afford them damaging their economy. There is too much business to be done in order to keep their economy afloat that if we threatened to cut their internet access, they would go out and put the criminals in prison for life.

China has bred themselves into a crisis. With their 1 child per couple law that has been in effect for decades, they now have 1 child that is supporting 2 parents who supports 4 granparents as they all move into retirement age. This is a monumental economic problem and is the reason why their economic policy is evolving at a rate that far outpaces the political evolution. External influences are what are changing the Chinese government, causing them to adopt rule sets and make changes that would never come internally.

Example: SARS...

People started flying out of China with this illness (SARS). Communist China denied the problem even existed. The World Health Organization stepped in and grounded all flights departing from specific regions of China, causing a panic in the Business world supporting the Chinese economy. This forced China to recognize the problem and adopt new information sharing rules whereby we now know about the Asian Bird Fru YEARS before it becomes a global pandemic (if it ever does). This is an external change that never would have come internally from their own country.

China monitors their internet very closely, they know who the criminals are. They will be shut down soon because to let them continue would 1) be an embarassment to China, and 2) could have disasterous economic consequences.

As a simple reference: The United States currently consumes 40 Quadrillion BTU's of energy per year from all sources. China consumes 7 QBTU and needs to get to 14 QBTU within the next 10 years in order to keep their economy from collapsing. They have a lot of work to do and they're not going to let malware authors derail their country. If they get derailed, they're going to be headed in the same direction as the Soviet Union. China will do anything to prevent that from happening, including invading their neighbors. China is a nation of pride, there is no way they're going to let their nation fail.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the citizens didn't much care because at least the Vodka was still cheap!

One Child Law...

I mostly agree with what you had to say. The part about the one child law is not that accurate however, so I wanted to comment on it.

China has bred themselves into a crisis. With their 1 child per couple law that has been in effect for decades, they now have 1 child that is supporting 2 parents who supports 4 granparents as they all move into retirement age. This is a monumental economic problem and is the reason why their economic policy is evolving at a rate that far outpaces the political evolution. External influences are what are changing the Chinese government, causing them to adopt rule sets and make changes that would never come internally.

This hasn't really been in effect for as long as you think. My girlfriend and I are both 20, and her parents were both born well before the one child law. So probably the very first people born under this law have started to have children. I was also told by her family (not sure if this is 100% accurate) that the law works every other generation. So if you were a single child, you can have two children -- and they can have a single child, and their children can have two children, and so forth. In addition to all of this, it is worth mentioning that the population of China is still (slowly) growing, which indicates that the one child law isn't as strictly enforced as you might think.

With respect to the rest of what you said, I agree with a lot of it. External influences dictate a huge amount of the national policy in the country. To even keep up the pace of growth that they have been sustaining for as long as they have shows that they are hugely more aware of international and economic policy than many people give them credit for. At the end of the day, China will do what it needs to do to keep their economy strong and safe.

Slashdot crowd is safe!

to the point where some unlucky persons may be getting some every day.

That's not us. For better or worse...

No news like old news

Deja-vu, anyone? [google.co.uk]

Without intellectual property...

Without intellectual property laws, is it even technically illegal to steal passwords in China? I mean, the downsides are obvious, but I don't think that Chinese law is prepared for this sort of thing.

Oh hmm.

...to the point where some unlucky persons may be getting some every day.

TFS makes it sound as if that is a bad thing.

Welcome to Slashdot, I guess. :)

use linux

use linux and this wouldnt be happening

Hello? This is a WINDOWS problem

Why aren't Microsoft or Windows mentioned in the headline or summary, since they are the enablers of this entire phenomenon?

confused...

so whats the sense of chinese wall?

Re:Catching up?

...because for the most part its all in chinese. think about it, we pretty much have "western" adware and spyware mapped out to the point where we know whos behind what and what the files are doing. security researchers can map out whole families of CWS, even if they don't specifically know whos behind it. throw some chinese adware on a pc however, and even something as basic as the sites popping up is a strange new experience. are the sites legit? hacked? the adware guys current flavour of the month? who knows? and thats before youve even got to the adware. i imagine the problems are multiplied when dealing with something more malicious.

Re:Catching up?

Malware Rootkits AdWare is all pretty standard stuff.

How exactly is this news?

That which serves ads must be news.

Re:SOP

Actually, my SOP is just to block all IP traffic from China and Russia and other such nasty places. That helps a LOT with all kinds of malware and spam.