Botnet

Twitter Used As Botnet Command & Control Channel

A botnet that uses Twitter for command and control? You bet. Jose Nazario over at Arbor Networks apparently found one: “Basically what it does is use the status messages to send out new links to contact, then these contain new commands or executables to download and run.” The bots connect to the Twitter account using an RSS feed, allowing them to receive the tweets in real time without having their own accounts on Twitter. Pretty slick.

The tweets themselves are base64 encoded and when Nazario translated one of them, it was clear the encoded tweet was sending links to the bot.

Oddly enough, there’s no mention of this at http://status.twitter.com, but the account in question (well, one of them, at least—there are probably more), https://twitter.com/upd4t3, has been suspended, so it appears that  Twitter security folks are on the ball.

“Of Course, I Never Reply to Spam – Except Sometimes”

Sounds funny, doesn’t it?  But that’s part of the title of a consumer survey recently completed by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG): “A Look at Consumers’ Awareness of Email Security and Practices or ‘Of Course, I Never Reply to Spam – Except Sometimes.‘” The report is issued in two parts: Part 1 is a summary of the results; Part 2 is the actual survey data complete with charts. Here’s an excerpt from the report’s abstract:

This survey was commissioned by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) to gain a better understanding of consumers’ awareness of the risks associated with viruses and “bots” spread through email and to determine how the industry can best work with consumers in dealing with important messaging threats.  The research covers bot awareness and also asks the frequently voiced question: “Why did you click on that spam link?”  It identifies the specific actions consumers take to protect themselves against viruses and junk mail, looks at consumers’ attitudes toward virus mitigation, and seeks to quantify and understand consumers’ email habits.

One of the most striking results from this research is that while 82% of consumers are aware of “bots” and malware threats, only 20% believe there is a very good chance their computers could get infected.

What surprises me is the high percentage of consumers who are aware of bots; what doesn’t surprise me is that most of those have a “won’t happen to me” attitude.

The real eye opener in this study is the responses to survey question 12: “If you have ever clicked on a link or replied to an email that you suspected was spam, why did you take this action?” The majority of respondents (52%) said they had clicked or replied. 17% said they “made a mistake.” It happens, especially if you have a twitchy clicker finger. There’s no excuse for the 12% who said they were “interested in the product/service” being offered nor the completely clueless 6% who “wanted to see what would happen.” Unbelievable! It’s these people who are the reason spam won’t go away. They’re also the folks whose PCs I have to clean up on a regular basis.

Fellow security professionals, we have our work cut out for us.

Accused Spam King Alan Ralsky Pleads Guilty

Once again, I’m behind on the news. This Security Fix report is almost a week old:

Alan Ralsky, a 64-year-old Michigan man that federal investigators say was among the world’s top spam kingpins, pleaded guilty on Monday to running a multi-million dollar international stock fraud scam powered by junk e-mail.

Ralsky … and his son-in-law and chief financial officer Scott K. Bradley, 38, also of Michigan, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act.

Under the terms of his plea agreement, Ralsky faces a federal prison sentence of 87 months and a fine of $1 million. He allegedly earned up to $3 million on the Chinese penny stock scam that he promoted using junk mail sent out by various botnets. It’s interesting that the plea agreement doesn’t call for the forfeiture of his profits. So, he’ll spend his time in a minimum-security “camp” at taxpayer expense and, probably get released well before his full sentence is up the while earning interest on the money he has squirreled away somewhere.

BTW, my apologies for being lax in keeping this blog up to date. I do have an excuse: I tore ligaments in my left hip and have been unable to sit, stand or lie down for the better part of two weeks.  Look for a more regular posting schedule next month.

Conficker’s raison d’etre? Profit, of Course

More than a week after Conficker’s much-hyped April 1st activation date, the botnet has come to life and is using a P2P communication system to update itself on what is believed to be millions of infected PCs. Along with the update, the worm is downloading scareware known as SpywareProtect2009, according to Alex Gostev of Kaspersky Lab:

One of the files is a rogue anti-virus app, which we detect as FraudTool.Win32.SpywareProtect2009.s. The first version of Kido (Conficker), detected back in November 2008, also downloaded fake antivirus to the infected machine. And once again, six months later, we’ve got unknown cybercriminals using the same trick.

As is typical with scareware, once SpywareProtect2009 is downloaded, the victim will start seeing the usual popup warning messages asking if they want to “clean and protect” their PC (see screen shot below). Of course, this will cost them $49.95. The criminals will no doubt make millions on these fees alone while amassing a huge database of valid credit card numbers that will likely be sold for additional profit.

Threatpost.com has posted an excellent FAQ and also provides a disinfection tool called KKiller for download.

Worm Targets Home Networking Equipment

As reported yesterday in The Register, the “psyb0t” worm targets home routers and modems and may be the first piece of malware to do so. Researchers from DroneBL, a real-time tracker of abusable IPs, say that as of March 22 100,000 hosts had been infected.

Whether or not your equipment is vulnerable depends on three things:

Your device is a mipsel (MIPS running in little-endian mode, this is what the worm is compiled for) device.

Your device also has telnet, SSH or web-based interfaces available to the WAN, and

Your username and password combinations are weak, OR the daemons that your firmware uses are exploitable.

“This technique is one to be extremely concerned about,” the researchers say, “because most end users will not know their network has been hacked, or that their router is exploited. This means that in the future, this could be an attack vector for the theft of personally identifying information.”

If you believe your equipment is vulnerable or has been compromised, you should immediately take the following actions:

1. Power cycle your router.
2. Disable WAN-facing telnet, SSH or web-based configuration interfaces.
3. Change the passwords to something unguessable (see this article).
4. Upgrade to the latest firmware.

Software for Secure Computing: Trend Micro’s RUBotted

I stumbled across this nifty free tool when running an online scan at Trend Micro’s HouseCall site. Botnets are a big problem, accounting for most of the spam on the Internet, not to mention their use in stealing financial information and launching denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. RUBotted (Beta) “…monitors your computer for suspicious activities and regularly checks with an online service to identify behavior associated with Bots. Upon discovering a potential infection, RUBotted prompts you to scan and clean your computer.” Note that this tool doesn’t clean anything–you still have to use antivirus software. Alternatively, you can take advantage of one of the many online malware scanners.

The tool runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP Home and Professional, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows Vista (32-bit only), providing the latest service packs are installed. There’s one caveat, however:  Trend says, “RUBotted cannot protect computers running Panda Internet Security 2008.”

I hope that this effort by Trend starts a trend (pun intended) of vendors providing similar secure computing software, perhaps incorporating bot removal tools to boot. We’ll see.