FYI...

RBN (Russian Business Network) now nationalized, invades Georgia Cyber Space
- http://rbnexploit.blogspot.com/
Sat – 2008 08 09 5:00 EST - "As requested by community relay, the following is a report on the cyber war underway in parallel with conventional warfare. Many of Georgia’s internet servers were under external control from late Thursday, Russia’s invasion of Georgia commenced on Friday. It is further requested of any blog reader the information below is further relayed to the International Press and Community to ensure awareness of this situation..."
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/11/georgia_ddos_attack_reloaded/
11 August 2008

- http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/11/russian-hackers-launch-georgia
11 August 2008

FYI...

Georgian Websites Under Attack - DDoS and Defacement
- http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Calendar.20080811
11 August 2008 - "... we had not seen any other C&C servers taking aim at Georgian websites... until last Friday (August 8, 2008). The date appears to coincide with military movement that has since escalated into fighting between the two countries. Since August 8 we have witnessed multiple C&C servers attacking websites that are Georgian or sympathetic to the country. Some of the first targets we saw once again involved the Georgian government. The website for the President (www .president.gov.ge) and the website for the Parliament of Georgia (www .parliament.ge) were both targeted. However, the attacks were not limited to just government websites. We have witnessed at least six different C&C servers attacking various websites that are not government sites. In some cases the various C&C servers were and still are attacking the same websites. The following websites have come under attack in the past few days:
www .president.gov.ge
www .parliament.ge
apsny.ge
news.ge
tbilisiweb.info
newsgeorgia.ru
os-inform.com
www .kasparov.ru
hacking.ge
mk.ru
newstula.info
skandaly.ru
One will notice that not all of these are Georgian websites. However, it is interesting to see that the same groups involved with targeting various Russian media outlets have also been taking aim at various Georgian websites... these attacks have expanded beyond just denial of service attacks. At the time of this writing the websites for the Georgian Pariliament has been defaced by a group claiming to be from South Ossetia. On the website the attackers have inserted a large image made up of several smaller side-by-side images of pictures of both the Georgian President and Adolf Hitler...
Edit: (08-11-2008 9:10 PM EDT): We have since removed a screen shot of the defaced page as we do not want to glorify the group behind it. At this time the page is still defaced and can be viewed. However, we would caution against visiting the site as it may still be under control of the attackers...
While this flurry of activity appears to coincide with recent events involving Russia and Georgia, we do not have solid information surrounding the who and the why. We have no reason to think the government is involved and can only speculate that it could be a grass root effort by the attackers. What is clear is that there are groups that are looking to keep Georgian websites offline."

//

FYI..

- http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/08/web_fraud_20_distributing_your.html
August 22, 2008 - "The allure of cyber crime lies in its promise of quick riches, much like that of the illegal drug trade. But building a network of hacked personal computers that can distribute your data-stealing malicious software is a time-consuming process that requires a modicum of skill. That is, until recently, when several online services have emerged that promise to help would-be cyber crooks graduate from common street dealers to distributors overnight. Such is the aim of services like "loads.cc," which for a small fee will take whatever malware you provide and inject it into a pre-selected number of PCs already compromised and under the thumb of the service owners. Currently, loads.cc claims to have 264,552 hacked systems in more than a dozen countries that it can use as hosts for any malicious software that clients want to install. The latest details from the "statistics" page displayed for members says the service has gained some 1,679 new infectable nodes in the last two hours, and more than 33,000 over the past 24 hours... Other up-and-coming malware distribution services are trying to gain a foothold in this nascent criminal Web 2.0 industry. Loadsforyou.biz offers slightly more competitive rates, promising to stitch your malware into 10,000 hacked PCs in the U.S. for just $120... it's probably best to avoid visiting the sites named in this post, as they exist solely to orchestrate the infection of computer systems..."

FYI...

Machines controlled by Botnets has quadrupled in 3 months
- http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4963
Last Updated: 2008-09-01 16:16:33 UTC = "...some of the data put out by the Shadowserver Foundation that tracks botnets. One piece of information grabbed my eye, namely that over the last 3 months, the number of infected machines quadrupled*. During the same time period, there isn't an appreciable increase in new malware, new viruses or anything that would obviously indicated why this is so. I imagine that the bad guys have gotten better about keeping machines owned, but there is one vector that we need to get much better about tracking and managing, and that's direct web-based malware. The timing, very roughly, coincides with when we started to see increase SQL injection attacks against webservers (mind you, this is an educated guess that SQL injections are a big part of this, not a statement of fact). We are very good at tracking email-based malware (including lead-the-user-to-the-bad-website variety) and certainly network based attacks. Short of spidering the web on a consistent basis, it gets difficult to find infected sites for that malware..."
* http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Stats.BotCount90-Days

FYI...

- http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2008/10/paper-as-the-net-churns-fast-flux-botnet-observations/
October 7, 2008 - "...Fast flux botnets are gathering a great deal of attention, and for good reason. Several groups have been working on similar research questions and have found similar results... Botnet herders often use fast-flux DNS techniques to host unwanted or illegal content within a botnet. These techniques change the mapping of the domain name to different bots within the botnet with constant shifting, while the bots simply relay content back to a central server. This can give the attackers additional stepping stones to thwart takedown and can obscure their true origins. Evidence suggests that more attackers are adopting fast-flux techniques, but very little data has been gathered to discover what these botnets are being used for... We found that the active lifetimes of fast-flux botnets vary from less than one day to months, domains that are used in fast-flux operations are often registered but dormant for months prior to activation, that these botnets are associated with a broad range of online fraud and crime including pharmacy sites, phishing and malware distribution, and that we can identify distinct botnets across multiple domain names..."

FYI...

- http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/warezov/
10/15/08 - "...as of 2008, it appears Warezov is back in the spamming business - but operating differently this time... Warezov was historically spread via email attachments, however that activity has also largely ceased. These days, executable attachments via email are almost universally blocked. Most botnet operators have switched to installing via browser/plugin exploits or social engineering. Warezov is no different. Only a few days ago, we saw Warezov being spread through a site advertising free MP3s via download of a P2P program. No exploits were used here, just social engineering. The user has to choose to install the software, which is simply the Warezov trojan... Like many botnets, Warezov is really a payload delivery system. It can install any software the botnet operator wishes. Since the end of the stock spamming activity, Warezov has mainly served as a "fast-flux" hosting platform... Warezov accomplishes this activity by installing two components: a reverse HTTP proxy that serves the content from a hidden master server, and a DNS server which is actually a customized installation of the popular ISC BIND software compiled for Windows. Each DNS server acts as a slave which gets zone updates from the hidden master server... Regardless of what methods are in use, spam is not going away any time soon. There is clearly too much money involved in spam and as a result, botnets... Despite indictments that may exist in the U.S., there are too many obstacles, both technical and political, that make it nearly impossible to get Russian botmasters arrested..."

(Screenshots available at the URL above.)

FYI...

- http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,152965/printable.html
October 28, 2008 - "...Much like the bot software they install, SQL injection and similar Web attacks force victim sites to do their bidding. And they have a growing number of holes to target: In 2007 one security company, SecureWorks, found 59 flaws in applications that allowed for SQL injection attacks. So far in 2008, it has found 366... According to Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, for a would-be botnet criminal these Web exploit attacks are by far the preferred choice for distributing evil code... When IT workers and antivirus companies catch on to bot infections and clean them up, the crooks respond by infecting a new batch of PCs. "They're having to keep up these seeding campaigns to keep up their botnet size," Stewart says. Those seeding campaigns typically employ Web attacks that target outdated browser plug-ins and other vulnerable software. "Flash and RealPlayer [plug-ins] - those are the big ones," Stewart says. The attacks are often successful because it can be hard for users to know when a plug-in is old and susceptible, especially if it's so old as to predate automatic updates. The free Personal Software Inspector* (or PSI) from Secunia can make that task easier. It will scan for outdated software and also provide links to patches or updated versions..."
* http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/online/

FYI...

Secure Computing Q3 Internet Threats Report...
- http://www.securecomputing.com/pdf/SCC-InternetThrtRprt-Oct08.pdf
October 28, 2008 - Some highlights:
• Acquisition of innocent machines via email and Web-based infections continued in Q3 at about the same pace measured in Q2, with over 5,000 new zombies created every hour.
• Top Five Malware Detections in Q3 – by Prevalence
1. The infection of legitimate Web sites continues to be the main venue for the most prevalent malware outbreaks. These infections are usually induced through SQL injection attacks...
2. Following closely is a new entry among top detections: "Trojan.Hijacker.Gen," is a new generic detection name for any malware that creates backdoor access to victim computers...
3. Although detected by virtually every anti-malware product, the NetSky worm... remains high in prevalence due to zombie machines that remain infected and continue to create email traffic years later.
4. Fourth place goes to another proactive detection for any malware that uses the "FSG" runtime-packer, which continues to be in widespread use. Runtime-packers are used to quickly create new variants of a malware family and hide their malicious intent under an obfuscation layer. It should be noted that these top four malware variants account for 70% of the detected malware today.
5. Another new entry, dubbed "HIDDENEXT.Worm.Gen", also covers the "Autoruns" worm that appeared on a digg.com entry this quarter. The "Autoruns" worm spreads through removable devices, such as USB sticks and mapped network drives. See http://www.trustedsource.org/blog/150/Digging-for-Worms for more information...
• Over the course of Q3 the TrustedSource reputation system was able to identify over 600 new Web sites that have been deployed and tagged with a malicious reputation prior to serving any malicious content. Identifying these Web sites proactively through the use of traffic analysis and examination of historical connections to criminal individuals or networks is now essential as they are increasingly used to deploy zero-day/zero-hour malware code that is not detected by the traditional signature-based, anti-malware products...

FYI...

- http://www.sophos.com/security/blog/2008/11/1995.html?_log_from=atom
16 November 2008 - "While the take-down of McColo received a lot of attention in the last few days, it seems not everyone was listening: the company came back online yesterday for a while thanks to TeliaSonera AB, a Swedish ISP that has a router in San Jose... Apparently those responsible for hooking up new customers at TeliaSonera don’t read security blogs. That said, the company does deserve props for its rapid response to complaints: I emailed their abuse@ address yesterday evening, received a reply a few hours later from Jimmy Arvidsson — the head of their security department — saying they were taking action to revoke the peering, and when I started work in Vancouver this morning McColo was down again. It’s great to see such a rapid result from a complaint to an ISP!... we were both too late to prevent the Rustock guys hurriedly pushing an update to at least some of their bots, switching them from McColo to a new host in Russia during the brief period of connectivity. Thus we should expect spam volumes to increase again soon (Rustock is estimated* to be capable of sending 30 billion spams per day), though how big an increase we’ll see depends largely on the number of zombie PCs the botnet’s controller was able to reach during McColo’s temporary resurrection. For now, though, volume on our spamtraps is still hovering around a quarter of what it was before the take-down..."
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#List_of_Botnets

FYI...

- http://www.secureworks.com/research/blog/index.php/2008/11/18/first-atrivo-now-mccolo/
November 18, 2008 - "... The companies that were connected to Atrivo and McColo have severed those connections, removing the companies from the Internet... A number of other botnets, including Rustock, Srizbi, Pushdo and Ozdok had infrastructure hosted at McColo. It’s clear that this infrastructure remains in place... Other botnets will also be relocating their C&C servers. While most, if not all, will just pop up in another datacenter, the growing trend of upstream providers disconnecting nefarious hosting companies is encouraging. So far these companies have been US based. We’re now seeing early evidence that bot-herders are moving their C&C servers overseas. The next question is: will the Internet community be able to put pressure on those companies and their upstream providers to prevent the bot-herders from finding a new safe haven?"

Do we know for sure that the botherders moved stuff during that brief window with Telia? It would seem they would have to have been tipped off that it was going to happen to be ready to work and to have alternative hosting lined up.

The graph of the last 10 days spam rates as measured by Spamcop show that the huge reduction in global spamming has not changed
http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spammonth

So if they recovered their C&C systems, they have not yet put them back into spamming service.

FYI...

Rogue DNS Servers on the Move
- http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2008/11/rogue-dns-servers-on-the-move/
November 20, 2008 - "Based on our internal malcode analysis, we have been able to identify netblocks of “rogue” DNS servers. These servers seem to hand out the correct answer for proper queries, but for typos they hand out a DNS server that *may* be malicious, it’s not clear to me yet. Clearly this is a concern when you have active alterations of something as fundamental as DNS, even when the actor is otherwise perfectly trustworthy. I’ve gone through a number of our identified rogue DNS servers following the demise of Atrivo and McColo to see where they all point. They all now point to a different network but only a handful of servers... Folks who use these DNS servers as the result of malcode you’ll get Internet connectivity problems... Those destination IPs all exist in an ISP named “SingleHop”; this network is otherwise not on my radar at this point, but I’ll have to keep an eye on it due to this suspicious behavior."

(More detail at the URL above.)

FYI...

- http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/11/spam_volumes_expected_to_rise.html
November 26, 2008 - "... The "Srizbi" botnet, a collection of more than half a million hacked PCs that were responsible for relaying approximately 40 percent of all spam sent worldwide, was knocked offline two weeks ago due to pressure from the computer security community. On Nov. 11, the Internet servers used to control the Srizbi botnet were disconnected when a Web hosting firm identified by security experts as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity was taken offline by its Internet providers. Turns out, Srizbi's authors had planned ahead for such a situation by building into each bot a fail-safe mechanism in case its master control servers were unavailable: A mathematical algorithm that generates a random but unique Web site domain name to check for new instructions and software updates. With such a system in place, the malware authors can regain control over the bots merely by registering the Web site names that the infected machines are trying to visit and placing the instructions there. According to FireEye*, a security company in Milpitas, Calif., that has closely tracked the botnet's actviity, a number of those rescue domains were registered Tuesday evening, apparently directing at least 50,000 of the Srizbi-infected machines to receive new instructions and malicious software updates from servers in Estonia..."
* http://blog.fireeye.com/research/2008/11/its-srizbi-trun-now.html
2008.11.25 - "... The new Command and Control servers are located in Estonia, and the domains registered through a registrar in Russia... all SMTP servers that the sample tried to contact ended in .ru. One of these servers was the largest bank in Russia. This is yet another tie of Botnets to Russia..."

Srizbi botnet update...

- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/26/srizbi_returns_from_dead/
26 November 2008 20:48 GMT - "...At time of writing, most of Srizbi's connection to the outside world had once again been severed, thanks to decisive actions taken to shut down servers located in Estonia. A single server located in Germany continued to host some nodes of the network, as researchers scrambled to get it shut down as well. "An onslaught of spam was certainly averted," said Alex Lanstein, a researcher at intrusion detection system prover FireEye, who has spent the past four weeks closely monitoring Srizbi. "Estonia stepped in in record time and kicked these guys off line"..."