<![CDATA[[SecurityRatty] tag: proprietary]]> http://securityratty.com/tag/proprietary Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:02:15 +0000 iRatty Engine http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss <![CDATA[Links List 10.10.08]]> http://securityratty.com/article/e68ccc27eb670a14c5008d0e963a10e2 http://securityratty.com/article/e68ccc27eb670a14c5008d0e963a10e2 You cannot turn around without bumping into another bad news story about the economy. From layoffs (10% of eBay’s workforce, 7.5% of HP’s) to the bailouts to the $7 billion loan the state of California needs to make payroll this month. Really, 7 beeeellllyon dollars? How many people shook their heads and felt sorry for the people working at financial services companies, all the while thinking that the tech sector was a pretty secure place to be (as long as you weren’t in the IT department at a financial services company)? Well, now apparently comes the wake up call for tech. Oh yeah, a bunch of those startups and not-so-young-anymore startups are FUNDED. They’re not making MONEY – or at least certainly not enough to actually be PROFITABLE, given the way they’ve been spending on payroll, sales and marketing to grow as quickly as possible. To get to that visibility and magic number of customers which means a big payoff for the investors and the founders. From the reports, it’s back to basics time, or at least that’s what the VCs are telling their portfolio companies. Cut costs. Layoff people. Focus on selling. And get profitable. Duh.

So can open source weather out the economic storm? Emerging from the dot-com bust, open source has matured, its legal framework and values are established, and serious players are in the game. But as this post on ZDNet points out, consolidation is on the way. “IDC renamed its LinuxWorld Show in San Francisco next year Open Source World – a clear shot across the bow at O’Reilly’s OSCON.” Will open source (from free to lower-cost alternatives to commercial software) flourish in a time of tightening budgets or will projects quietly go away for lack of funding (VC and that pesky business model thing) and, let’s face it, the “extra time” of IT pros tasked yet again to do more with less?

It’s October 2008 and Charles Babcock writes, “CA Embraces Virtualization As Future of Data Center Management”. Beyond keeping up with what competitors are doing, I enjoy this article for the masterful way it depicts the nightmare that is working with traditional frameworks. Too slow, too expensive, too complex, too many modules – it’s all in here. And somehow, I don’t think that was the point of it. So, $154,000 for CA Data Center Automation Manager – which can “consult” the CA CMDB (pricing starting at what do you think, something like $500K to a million – don’t forget those services) plus CA Wily APM (Introscope 8 and Wily Customer Experience Manager 4.2; pricing anyone?) metrics that get fed back into Data Center Automation Manager to help determine the virtual machine resources that are needed. Plus can also integrate info from CA Endeavor’s software change management tracking and CA SysView and in future with CA Management Suite for Mainframe Linux, potentially. I am not kidding about this list. And, we’ve been hearing this for a while – “Unicenter” the brand goes away and is replaced by “CA NSM”. The brand goes away. Why retire a successful brand? Ah.

joe_tucciI love this post on EMC, “Eleven Things You Didn’t Know About the World’s Largest External Disk Storage Company.” Although I guess I really don’t know much about Joe Tucci, since #11 says:

“Contrary to conventional thought, it is not true that the EMC President/CEO is the older, gentler brother of the fictional patriarch of HBO’s hit television series.” Hunh. I just googled him, thinking maybe it was a resemblance thing. Nope."

And on a much lighter note. A funny from Dell. 2 years later, I just stumbled across this Proprietaryville , Jibjab-ish video, called Dell the Journey. Legacy systems being escorted onto the Retirement Home bus. Michael Dell as knight in shining armor, singing no less. Joe Tucci and Larry Ellison showing up as heroes leading the charge against Proprietaryville (yes, funny in and of itself). And my favorite, “Now let’s go kick some proprietary apps.”

delljibjab

]]> Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:15:00 +0000 services financial services company source source weather time extra time successful brand joe tucci dell Links List 10.10.08 <![CDATA[I/O for Virtual Machine Monitors: Security and Performance Issues]]> http://securityratty.com/article/5ab1056e9e9cde053ca48e03f1c13cbb http://securityratty.com/article/5ab1056e9e9cde053ca48e03f1c13cbb ]]> Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:42:03 +0000 proprietary device drivers current hypervisors move virtual machine monitor complex vmm security performance inherent complexity I/O for Virtual Machine Monitors: Security and Performance Issues <![CDATA[Inside a Managed Spam Service]]> http://securityratty.com/article/6ce6bddf4ee3d480d2e75b538f882e90 http://securityratty.com/article/6ce6bddf4ee3d480d2e75b538f882e90
A managed spam vendor always has to raise the stakes during its introduction period on the market. But what happens when a market follower starts using the market leader's proprietary managed spamming system, and is able to provide better spamming rates at a cheaper prices?  Market forces and unethical competition at its best.

So, what is this market challenger using the monopolist's -- in respect to managed spamming services not spam in general -- proprietary system (Spamming vendor launches managed spamming service) up to anyway? Promising and delivering, 1, 400,000 emails daily, 60,000 mails per hour, and 100 emails per minute. What we've got here are the spam metrics out of 5 already finished spam campaigns that has managed to sent out a million spam emails using only 2000 malware infected hosts. Also, CC-ing and BCC-ing made it possible to multiple the effect of the campaign and increase the total number of emails spammed. Talking about benchmarks, 789 emails per minute at a rate of 12/13 emails per second is a pretty good one, considering it's only 2k bots that they were using. What they also promise is automatic rotation of IPs upon automatically checking them against public blacklists, and a mix rotation of IPs from their own netblocks located in Russia and Germany with the fresh IPs coming from the newly infected hosts.

Earlier this month, I discussed the market leader's managed spamming system, access to which they also offer for rent :

"An inside look of the system obtained on 2008-08-12 indicates that they are indeed capable of delivering what they promise - speed, simplicity and 5000 malware infected hosts. Moreover, the attached screenshot demonstrates that 20 different email databases can be simultaneously used resulting in 16,523,247 emails about to get spammed using 52 different macroses. Furthermore, what they refer to as a dynamic set of regional servers aiming to ensure that the central server never gets exposed, is in fact fast-flux which depending on how many bots they are willing to put into “rtsegional server mode” shapes the size of the fast-flux network at a later stage."

With cutting edge managed spam services like the ones currently in circulation, it remains to be seen whether or not spammers would migrate to this outsourcing model, or continue coming up with adaptive ways to send out their scams and malware on their own.
]]> Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:20:32 +0000 spam spam services market market follower starts emails daily emails spam campaigns million spam emails market challenger Inside a Managed Spam Service <![CDATA[Web Based Malware Eradicates Rootkits and Competing Malware]]> http://securityratty.com/article/ab3faf956826a6c7466d7d83fa5572f5 http://securityratty.com/article/ab3faf956826a6c7466d7d83fa5572f5
A tiny 20kb antivirus module within "yet another web based malware in the wild", promises to get rid of all Zeus variants, and also, detect and remove rootkits found on the infected system in order to ensure that it's the only malware the victim remains infected with. What's really special about its command and control interface is that it's AJAX based, with the seller pitching the feature as "you no longer have to hit F5 in order to see how's your malware campaign doing".

Here's a brief (translated) description :

- Simultaneously execute different campaigns, allocate specific bots for specific countries only, set time and data for automatic update with the new binaries
- Firewalls and antivirus bypassing capabilities, Anti-tracing, anti-reverse engineering
- Self defense mechanism for harder removal
- ICQ notifications for finished tasks, newly infected hosts, graphical statistics

Exactly how it removes rootkits remains yet unknown due to its proprietary nature and brief description, but resetting the hosts file and taking advantage of updated BHO list of known malware are among the ways it removes competing malware.
]]> Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:08:43 +0000 malware web based malware malware campaign removes rootkits remains removes hosts hosts file unknown due remove rootkits Web Based Malware Eradicates Rootkits and Competing Malware <![CDATA[How to fortify your connection]]> http://securityratty.com/article/2e792d11e260cc07a5880f6840d2547b http://securityratty.com/article/2e792d11e260cc07a5880f6840d2547b Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:00:00 +0000 wi-fi networks public wi-fi confidential information passes secure lans inherently cso day How to fortify your connection <![CDATA[Google Moves to 3rd Party Processing - The eCrime equivalent]]> http://securityratty.com/article/5d3a5ef1fc28736fbad39c7bf01b5354 http://securityratty.com/article/5d3a5ef1fc28736fbad39c7bf01b5354 The numbers behind Google's processing are staggering. Indexing over one trillion URLs, the Internet search giant reported in January that it processes 20 Petabytes of data per day.

Turns out a Petabyte is 1000 Terbytes. So Google processes over 20,000 Terabytes of data per day. Supporting all of this impossibly massive data crunching is a huge network of proprietary servers and custom made storage. It's the mythical Google grid.

Google conceals the exact nature of the grid; it's one of their trade secrets.

So, what if I told you Google is abandoning its mythical, proprietary, custom-made processing and storage grid, and is moving to an off-the-shelf third party processing platform?

Any boffin would have choked on this scoop.

OK, relax. Google isn't ditching its proprietary grid. But its eCrime equivalent is certainly doing exactly that.

]]> Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:00:00 +0000 google grid proprietary grid storage grid storage processes google processes mythical google grid mythical Google Moves to 3rd Party Processing - The eCrime equivalent <![CDATA[Summarizing August's Threatscape]]> http://securityratty.com/article/01c05fcd5f209b7515be2cee57a93c9b http://securityratty.com/article/01c05fcd5f209b7515be2cee57a93c9b
Following the previous summaries of June's and July's threatscape based on all the research published during the month, it's time to summarize August's threatscape.

August's threatscape was dominated by a huge increase of rogue security software domains made possible due to the easily obtainable templates for the sites, several malware campaigns targeting popular social networking sites, Russian's organized cyberattack against Georgia with evidence on who's behind it pointing to "everyone" and a few botnets dedicated to the attack making the whole process easy to outsource and turn responsibility into an "open topic", several new web based botnet management kits and tools found in the wild, evidence that the 76service may in fact be going mainstream since the concept of cybercrime as a service is already emerging, and, of course, a peek at India's CAPTCHA solving economy, where the best comment I've received so far is that every site should embrace reCAPTCHA, so that while solving CAPTCHAs and participating in the abuse of these services in question, they would be also digitizing books. As usual, August was a pretty dynamic month for the middle of summer, with everyone excelling in their own malicious field.

01. McAfee's Site Advisor Blocking n.runs AG - "for starters"
False positives are rather common, especially when you're aiming to protect the end user from himself and not let him gain access to "hacking tools", but you're flagging security tools as badware and missing over half the SQL injected domains currently in the wild due to the fact that SiteAdvisor's community still haven't reviewed them - that's not good

02. The Twitter Malware Campaign Wants to Bank With You
Twitter, just like every Web 2.0 application, isn't and shouldn't be treated as a unique platform for dissemination of malware, since it's dissemination of malware "as usual". This particular malware campaign was not just executed by a lone gunman, but also, was taking advantage of a flaw allowing the author to add new followers potentially exposing them to the malicious links serving banker malware. For the the time being, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter accounts are the very last thing a malicious attacker is interesting in puchasing accounting data for, but how come? It's all due to the oversupply of automatically registered accounts at other popular services, whose ecosystem of Internet properties empower cybercriminals with the ability to launch, host and distribute malware in between abusing the very same company's services for the blackhat SEO campaign and redirection services. Theoretically, a distributed network build upon the services provided by a single company is faily easy to accomplish due to the single login authentication applied everywhere. A singly bogus Gmail account results in a blackhat SEO hosting blogspot account, flash based redirector hosted at Picasa, and a couple of thousands of spam emails sent automatically sent through Gmail in order to abuse it's trusted email reputation
 
03. Compromised Web Servers Serving Fake Flash Players
If aggressiveness matter, this campaign consisting of remotely injected redirection scripts at legitimate sites next to on purposely introduced malware oriented domains, was perhaps the most aggressive one during the month. Fake flash players, fake windows media players and fake youtube players are prone to increase as a social engineering tactic of choice due to the template-ization of malware serving sites for the sake of efficiency

04. Pinch Vulnerable to Remotely Exploitable Flaw
With Zeus vulnerable to a remotely exploitable flaw allowing cybercriminals to hijack other cybercriminal's Zeus botnet, private exploits targeting the still rather popular at least in respect to usefulness Pinch malware are leaking, allowing everyone including security researchers to take a peek at a particular campaign running unpatched Pinch gateway

05. Phishers Backdooring Phishing Pages to Scam One Another
Backdooring phishing pages is perhaps the most minimalistic approach a cybercriminal wanting to scam another cybercriminal is going to take. The far more beneficial approach that I've encountered on a couple of occassions so far, would be to backdoor a proprietary web malware exploitation kit, release it in the wild, let them put the time and efforts into launching the campaigns, then hijack their botnet. In fact, the possibilities for backdooring copycat web malware exploitation kits in order to take advantage of the momentum while introducing a non-existent kit has always been there at the disposal of malicious attackers. One thing's for sure - there's no such thing as a free web malware exploitation kit, just like there isn't such thing as a free phishing page

06. Email Hacking Going Commercial - Part Two
In between the scammers promising the Moon and asking for anything between $20 to $250 to hack into an email account, there are "legitimate" services taking advantage of web email hacking kits consisting of each and every known XSS vulnerability for a particular service in an attempt to increase the chances of the attacker. And given that the majority of these have been patched a long time ago, social engineering comes into play. Do these services have a future? Definitely as more and more people are in fact looking for and requesting such services, in fact, they're willing to pay a bonus considering how exotic it is for them to have any email that they provide hacked into and the accounting data sent back to them

07. The Russia vs Georgia Cyber Attack
Event of the month? Could be, but just like every "event of the moth" everyone seems to be once again restating their "selective retention" preferences. What is selective retention anyway? Selective retention is basically a situation where once Russian is attacking another country's infrastructure, you would automatically conclude that it's Russian FSB behind the attacks and consciously and subconsciously ignore all the research and articles telling you otherwise, namely that the FSB wouldn't even bother acknowledging Georgia's online presence, at least not directly. Moreover, talking about the FSB as the agency behind the cyberattacks indicates "selective retention", talking about FAPSI indicates better understanding of the subject.

In times when cybercrime is getting ever easier to outsource, anyone following the news could basically orchestrate a large scale DDoS attack against a particular country in order to forward the responsibility to any country that they want to. In Russia vs Georgia, you have a combination of a collectivist society that's possessing the capabilities to launch DDoS attacks, knows where and how to order them, and that in times when your country is engaged in a war conflict drinking beer instead of DDoS-sing the major government sites of the adversary is not an option.

Selective retention when combined with a typical mainstream media's mentality to "slice the threat on pieces" instead of turning the page as soon as possible, is perhaps the worst possible combination. Furthermore, coming up with Social Network analysis of the cyberattacks would produce nothing more but a few fancy graphs of over enthusiastic Russian netizen's distributing the static list of the targets. The real conversations, as always, are happening in the "Dark Web" limiting the possibilities for open source intelligence using a data mining software. Things changed, OPSEC is slowly emerging as a concept among malicious parties, whenever some of the "calls for action" in the DDoS attacks were posted at mainstream forums, they were immediately removed so that they don't show up in such academic initiatives

08. 76Service - Cybercrime as a Service Going Mainstream
The reappearance of the 76Service allowing everyone to log into a web based interface and collect all the accounting and financial data coming from malware infected hosts across the globe for the period of time for which they've bought access, indicates that what used to be proprietary services which were supposedly no longer available, are now being operated in a do-it-yourself fashion. Goods and products mature into services, so from a cost-benefit analysis perspective, outsourcing is naturally most beneficial even when it comes to cybercrime

09. Who's Behind the Georgia Cyber Attacks?
If it's the botnets used in the attacks, they are known, if it's about who's providing the hosting for the command and control, it's the "usual suspects", but just like previous discussion of the Russian Business Network, it remains questionable on whether or not they work on a revenue-sharing basis, are simply providing the anti-abuse hosting, or are the shady conspirators that every newly born RBN expert is positioning them to be.

Cheap conversation regarding the RBN ultimately serves the RBN, and just for the record, there's a RBN alternative in every country, but the only thing that remains the same are the customers, tracking the customers means exposing the RBN and the international franchises of their services, making it harder to identify their international operations. And given that the "tip of the iceberg", namely RBN's U.S operations remain in tact, talking about taking actions against their international operations in countries where cybercrime law is still pending, is yet another quality research into the topic building up the pile of research into the very same segments of the very same ISPs.

Just for the record - these "very same ISPs" are regular readers of my blog, and if you analyze their activities, they're definitely reading yours too, ironically, surfing through gateways residing within their netblock that are so heavily blacklisted due to the guestbook and forum spamming activities that their bad reputation usually ends up in another massive blackhat SEO campaign exposed.

10. Guerilla Marketing for a Conspiracy Site
Conspiracy theorists may in fact have a new wallpaper to show off with

11. Banker Malware Targeting Brazilian Banks in the Wild
When misinformed and not knowing anything about a particular underground segment, a potential cybercriminal would stick to using such primitive compared to the sophisticated banker malware kits currently in the wild. These sophisticated banker malware kits are often coming in a customer-tailored proposition, with their price increasing or decreasing based on the specific module to be included or excluded. For instance, a module targeting all the U.S banks that has been put in a "learning mode" long before it was made available to the customers can be requested and is often available with the business model build around the customer's wants 

12. Compromised Cpanel Accounts For Sale
Despite the massive SQL injection attacks, accounting data for Cpanel accounts coming from malware infected hosts seems to be once again coming into play, which isn't surprising given the filtering capabilities and log parsing tools today's botnet masters are empowered with. These very same compromised Cpanel accounts and the associated domains often end up so heavility abused that it's tactics like these that are driving the underground multitasking mentality, namely, abusing a single compromised account for each and every malicious online activity you can think of - even hosting banners for their blackhat SEO services

13. A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Two
In August we saw a peek of fake security software, neatly typosquatted domains whose authors earn revenue each and every time someone installs the software. The vendors behind this software are forwarding the entire process of driving traffic to those excelling in aggregating traffic and abusing it. As anticipated, underground multitasking started taking place within the fake security software domains, with the people behind them introducing client-side exploits in order to improve the monetization of the traffic coming to the sites

14. DIY Botnet Kit Promising Eternal Updates
There's no such thing as a (quality) free botnet kit. What's for free is often the leftovers from a single feature of a more sophisticated proprietary botnet kit. This one in particular is however trying to demonstrate that even a plain simple GUI botnet command and control software can achieve the results desired by an average script kiddie, and not necessarily satisfy the needs of the experienced botnet master

15. A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Three
As far as trends and fads are concerned, the majority of the domains are currently parked at up to four different IPs, with most of them going into a stand by mode once they get detected and reappear back couple of weeks later

16. Fake Celebrity Video Sites Serving Malware - Part Two
Due to the template-ization of fake celebrity video sites, and simple traffic management tools combined with blackhat SEO tactics, these sites are also prone to increase in the next couple of months

17. Web Based Botnet Command and Control Kit 2.0
It's releases like these that remind us of the amount of time, efforts and personal touch that a malicious attacker would put into such a management kit, currently acting as a personal benchmark as far as complexity and features indicating the coder's experience with botnets is concerned. What's he's failing to anticipate is that this kit is sooner or later going to turn into the "MPack of botnet management"

18. A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Four
Keep it coming, we'll keep it exposing until we end up getting down to the "fake software vendor" itself

19. Automatic Email Harvesting 2.0
Email harvesting is slowly maturing into a vertically integrated service provided by vendors of managed spamming services. This email harvesting module is aiming to close the page on text obfuscation in respect to fighting spam, and is successfully recognizing and collecting such publicly available emails. From a psychological perspective though, the end users who bothered to obfuscate their emails are less likely to fall victims into phishing scams, with the obfuscation speaking for a relatively decent situational awareness on how they emails end up in a spammer's campaign

20. Fake Porn Sites Serving Malware - Part Three
As a firm believer in sampling in order to draw conclusions on the big picture, an approach that has proven highly accurate in modeling historical and upcoming tactics and behavior, a single fake porn site serving malware campaign usually exposes a dozen of misconfigured redirectors, which thanks to their misconfiguration despite the evasive features available within the kits, expose another dozen of malware campaigns

21. Facebook Malware Campaigns Rotating Tactics
With no particular flaw exploited other than the social engineering tactic of using already compromised Facebook accounts who would automatically spam all their friends with links to flash files hosted at legitimate services, the more persistent the campaign is, the higher the chance that it will scale enough. This campaign in particular is mainly relying on rotation of tactics, namely different messages, different services and file extensions used in order to trick someone's friend into visiting the URL. With the number of users increasing, the most popular social networking sites are naturally going to be permanently under attacks from cybercriminals

22. Fake Security Software Domains Serving Exploits
Despite that it's a single brand, namely the International Virus Research Lab that's introducing client-side exploits within it's portfolio of domains, the opportunity for abuse may be noticed by the rest of the brands pretty fast

23. Exposing India’s CAPTCHA Solving Economy
Taking into consideration the mentality surrounding a particular country's cybercriminals, how they think, how they operate, what do they define as an opportunity, and how much personal efforts are they willing to put into their campaigns, I wouldn't be surpised if a Russian vendor offering 100,000 bogus Gmail accounts for sale has in fact outsourcing the account registration process to Indian workers, paid them pocket change and is then reselling them ten to twenty times higher than the price he originally paid for them.

The text based CAPTCHAs used at the major Internet portals and services, are so efficiently abused by this approach that continuing to use is directly undermining the trust these email providers and services often come with as granted
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:57:32 +0000 malware facebook malware campaigns usefulness pinch malware banker malware kits malware campaigns botnet diy botnet kit distribute malware banker malware Summarizing August's Threatscape <![CDATA[Copycat Web Malware Exploitation Kits are Faddish]]> http://securityratty.com/article/ba56aabae03bad418cbbf5ae497d3769 http://securityratty.com/article/ba56aabae03bad418cbbf5ae497d3769
For the cheap cybercriminals not wanting to invest a couple of thousand dollars into purchasing a cutting edge web malware exploitation kit -- a pirated copy of which they would ironically obtained several moths later -- with all the related and royalty free updates coming with it, there are always the copycat malware kits like this one offered for $100.

Taking into consideration the proprietary nature of some of the kits, the business model of malware kits was mostly relying on their exclusive nature next to the number, and diversity of the exploits included in order to improve the infection rate. This simplistic assumption on behalf of the coders totally ignored the possibility of their kits leaking to the general public, or copies of the kits ending up as a bargain in particular underground deal where the once highly exclusive kit was offered as a bonus.

"Me too" web malware kits were a faddish way to enjoy the popularity of web malware kits like MPack and Icepack and try to cash in on that popularity by coming up average kits lacking any significant differentiation factors in the process. But just like the original and proprietary kits, whose authors didn't envision the long term growth strategy of integrating different services into their propositions or the kits themselves, the authors of copycat malware kits didn't bother considering the lack of long-term growth strategy for their releases. Branding in respect to releasing a Firepack malware kit to compete with Icepack which was originally released to compete with Mpack, has failed to achieve the desired results as well.

And with malware kits now a commodity, and underground vendors excelling in a particular practice with the long term objective to vertically integrate in their area of expertise -- think spammers offering localization of messages into different languages and segmented email databases from a specific country -- would we witness the emergence of managed cybercrime services charging a premium for providing fresh dumps of credit card numbers, PayPal, Ebay accounts or whatever the buyer is requesting?

That may well be the case in the long term.

Related posts:
Web Based Botnet Command and Control Kit 2.0
DIY Botnet Kit Promising Eternal Updates
Pinch Vulnerable to Remotely Exploitable Flaw
The Zeus Crimeware Kit Vulnerable to Remotely Exploitable Flaw
The Small Pack Web Malware Exploitation Kit
Crimeware in the Middle - Zeus
The Nuclear Grabber Kit
The Apophis Kit
The FirePack Exploitation Kit Localized to Chinese
MPack and IcePack Localized to Chinese
The Icepack Exploitation Kit Localized to French
The FirePack Exploitation Kit - Part Two
The FirePack Web Malware Exploitation Kit
The WebAttacker in Action
Nuclear Malware Kit
The Random JS Malware Exploitation Kit
Metaphisher Malware Kit Spotted in the Wild
The Black Sun Bot
The Cyber Bot
Google Hacking for MPacks, Zunkers and WebAttackers
The IcePack Malware Kit in Action
]]> Wed, 03 Sep 2008 03:18:08 +0000 malware kits web malware kits kits copycat malware kits proprietary kits term long-term growth strategy icepack icepack exploitation kit Copycat Web Malware Exploitation Kits are Faddish <![CDATA[Open source still looking to shake off concerns]]> http://securityratty.com/article/7e5163da79864cb4c3f5fc1de1d44091 http://securityratty.com/article/7e5163da79864cb4c3f5fc1de1d44091 Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:00:00 +0000 source software issues movement security doubts Open source still looking to shake off concerns <![CDATA[Web Based Botnet Command and Control Kit 2.0]]> http://securityratty.com/article/4f945955ba8a424fe6b9352583602062 http://securityratty.com/article/4f945955ba8a424fe6b9352583602062
The average web based command and control kit for a botnet consisting of single user, single campaign functions only, has just lost its charm, with a recent discovery of a proprietary botnet kit whose features clearly indicate that the kit's coder know exactly which niches to fill - presumably based on his personal experience or market research into competing products.

What are some its key differentiation factors? Multitasking at its best, for instance, the kits provides the botnet master with the opportunity to manage numerous different task such as several malware campaigns and DDoS attacks simultaneously, where each of these gets a separate metrics page.  

Automation of malicious tasks, by setting up tasks, and issuing notices on the status of the task, when it was run and when it was ended. Just consider the possibilities for a scheduling malware and DDoS attacks for different quarters.  

Segmentation in every aspect of the tasks, for instance, a DDoS attacks against a particular site can be scheduled to launched on a specific date from infected hosts based in chosen countries only.  

Customized DDoS in the sense of empowering the botnet master with point'n'click ability to dedicate a precise number of the bots to participate, which countries they should be based in, and for how long the attack should remain active. Quality and assurance in DDoS attacks based on the measurement of the bot's bandwidth against a particular country, in this case the object of the attack, so theoretically bots from neighboring countries would DDoS the country in question far more efficiently.  

Historical malware campaign performance, is perhaps the most quality assurance feature in the entire kit, presumably created in order to allow the person behind it to measure which were the most effective malware and DDoS campaigns that he executed in the past. From an OSINT perspective, sacrificing his operational security by maintaing detailed logs from previous attacks is a gold mine directly establishing his relationships with previous malware campaigns.

Bot Description:  
1. Completely invisible Bot work in the system.
2. Not loads system.
3. Invisible in the process.
4. Workaround all firewall.
5. Bot implemented as a driver.
Functions Bot (constantly updated): 
1. Downloading a file (many options).
2. HTTP DDoS (many options, including http authentication).
The web interface 
-- Convenient manager tasks.
-- Every task can be stopped, put on pause, etc. ...
-- Interest and visual scale of the task.  
-- A task manager for DDoS and Loader
    
-- For DDoS tasks
Bots involved in DDoS 'f.
Condition of the victim (works, fell).
2. Bots manager
-- Displays a list of bots (postranichno).
-- Obratseniya date of the first and last.
-- ID Bot.
-- Country Bot.
-- Type Bot.
-- The status Bot (online / offline).
-- Bot bandwidth to different parts of the world (europe, asia).
-- The possibility of removing bots
-- When you click on ID Bot loadable still a wealth of information about it
3. Statistics botneta
-- Statistics both common and build Bot.
-- Information on the growth and decline botneta dates (and build).
-- Bots online
-- All bots
-- Dead bots.

4. Statistics botneta country
-- All countries to work on 
-- New work by country 
-- Online work from country to country
-- Dead bots by country
5. Detailed history botneta 
6. Convenient user-friendly interface adding teams
8. Admin minimal server loads
-- Use php5/mysql
Upcoming features :
1. Form grabber (price increase substantially), for old customers will be charged as an upgrade
2. Public key cryptography
3. Clustering campaigns and DDoS attacks

Despite it's proprietary nature, it's quality and innovative features will sooner or later leak out for everyone to take advantage of, a rather common lifecycle for the majority of proprietary malware kits in general.

Related posts:
]]> Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:02:15 +0000 ddos attacks based ddos attacks malware previous malware campaigns ddos attacks simultaneously botnet country country bot ddos Web Based Botnet Command and Control Kit 2.0