Russian Denies Writing SoBig Worm 67
IphtashuPhitz writes "The Russian spamware programmer anonymously accused eariler this week of writing the Sobig worm has responded to the accusations. Ruslan Ibragimov of Send-Safe doesn't deny that his program uses proxies to hide spammer's identities. But he totally refutes the report's technical analysis in an online interview over at OReilly Network."
For sure he denies. (Score:5, Informative)
The binary comparison in the report shows evidence for a correlation between Send-Safe and Sobig-F which could be proved if Ibragimov would be forced to open the Send-Safe source.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:2, Informative)
0) All of these ideas involve disassembly. http://www.datarescue.com/idabase [datarescue.com]IDA Pro is the best dsassembler on the market; all ideas below are implemented as extensions to it. Nothing even comes close to its sheer strength, except perhaps the underdeveloped, alpha knockoff http://lida.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]Lida.
1) http://www.datarescue.com/idabase/flirt.htm [datarescue.com]FLIRT signatures work surprisingly well for the detection of statically-linked libraries (assuming the library itself hasn't been recompiled). It is basically binary-based but there are important measures for dealing with code that can/will change between different binaries.
A plugin called http://www.sport-und-event.de/backtrace.de/plugin
2) http://www.razorteam.com/publish/papers/comparing
The problem with the two methods above and the reason that byte-for-byte comparison won't work in general is that compilers regularly re-arrange code or change register allocation, especially in the case an optimization is applied differently between builds. Two successive builds might look completely different on the binary level. Microsoft's internal compilers are especially notorious for this.
Enter 3) http://www.sabre-security.com/products/bindiff.ht
2) & 3) conception was motivated by the idea of diffing security patches (which they do with various degrees of effeciency). 1) is arguably at the core of IDA's power.
P.S. the "Who Wrote SoBig?" authors are completely full of shit. From the paper:
"AMS [a *completely unrelated* email client] and Sobig contain common high-level functionality, as both programs generate and send email. Although there are many ways to create this functionality in source code, it is extremely unlikely that two people working independently would generate similar opcode sequences for this type of functionality. From the results of our comparisons, the first 1K of memory indicated that they are very similar types of executables."
No shit, that's because the first 1k of the executable is usually the PE header. "Very similar types of executables"? What does that mean, anyway? The whole report is anonymous, unfounded slander.