Internet of Things Botnet Menace

Forget self-aware AI systems taking over the world. If you read the hype over DDoS attacks you’d be forgiven for thinking an army of internet connected devices was on the march, herded by a gang of amateur criminals – the IoT bites back!

This isn’t about anything new, but the fact it’s being used in recent record-breaking DDoS attacks has brought the matter to the fore.

And then yesterday the code for the two main botnets, Miari, turned up, posted on Hackerforums by its originator, probably. The other similar botnet is known as Bashlight, but I understand it works in the same way and attacks the same devices. Originators of such code usually dump them in the public domain when they feel that they’re about to be busted. It makes it harder to prove they’re behind an attack when other people have, and are likely using, the same code.

A look at the code itself confirms what many have suspected for a long time; some CCTV equipment can be appropriated for naughty purposes. Unfortunately the affected equipment originates in China and is sold to a wide variety of companies who put their own badge on it, and sometimes customise the software. It’s basically a generic network-enabled Digital Video Recorder (DVR), with the generic name H.264 Recorder. Getting it all patched isn’t going to happen as there is no update mechanism, but if people changed their password to something hard to guess, rather than leaving it as the default 1234, the world would be a better place.

I’ve been looking at this type of CCTV equipment for over decade, ordering an embaressing number of samples from Alibaba and the like and building up a collection to rival my disparate VoIP endpoints. They have a lot in common – very little I the way of security or robustness in the face of attack. My advice to anyone using such kit is to install it behind NAT and use a VPN to access it externally.

But getting back to my theme, the media hype suggests that all sorts of IoT things have been hijacked. Unless I see any evidence to the contrary, this is simply not true. The CODE released targets one type of network DVR, and, in reality, it can’t even persist if the device is power-cycled. However, reports suggest that the time taken for the botnet to re-establish itself is very short.

I’ll be updating this article in the next few days once I’ve checked out a few facts concerning the code.

The spammed malware attack continues, but Microsoft SE has been getting it wrong

Kudos to Microsoft Security Essentials for picking up the nasty attachment being pumped out like crazy by the clean-skin botnet recently, while most of the other scanners failed to detect it. However, it was wrong about the identity of the malware. It’s not  Peals.F!plock, as I originally reported with skepticism. It’s now detected as a variation of something known as Troj/DocDl-YU (to use the name give by Sophos). Read about it here:

https://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/Troj~DocDl-YU/detailed-analysis.aspx

This uses Microsoft’s Office macro language to download further malware from the Internet and install it on the victim’s PC, so if anyone activates it there’ll be more than just this Trojan downloader to worry about. As it’s a Microsoft Word document, people tend to open it. If the government really wants to spend money telling the public how to avoid falling victim to cybercrime, they should start by warning about sending documents by email, instead of the current nonsense. Microsoft might get the hump, though, and as I understand it, they’re acting as advisors.

If people have macros disabled on Word, they’re probably okay as long as they don’t get tricked in to enabling them. I’m not hopeful in this regard.

Meanwhile, those behind it are changing the message tweaking the payload to avoid detection – quite successfully! The latest incarnation reads:


From: UUSCOTLAND@example.com

Subject: Water Services Invoice

Good Morning,

I hope you are well.

Please find attached the water services invoice summary for the billing period of 22 September 2015 to 22 October 2015.

Please generate and paste your ad code here. If left empty, the ad location will be highlighted on your blog pages with a reminder to enter your code. Mid-Post

If you would like any more help, or information, please contact me on 0345 #######. Our office is open between 9.00am and 5.00pm Monday to Friday. I will be happy to help you. Alternatively you can email me at UUSCOTLAND@example.com

Kind regards

Melissa

Melissa Lears

Billing Specialist

Business Retail

United Utilities Scotland

T: 0345 ####### (#####)

 


They appear to be updating it every morning at around 0800Z. Let’s see what we get tomorrow.

 

New botnet spammed malware – Peals.F!plock

This is a big one, coming from hitherto unlisted botnet addresses – and it’s coming right now. I’m cross referencing the blacklisted addresses now to see if I can see who’s had an expansion lately. Spamassassin isn’t that great at picking it up, with about 10% getting straight through and about 90% failing to reach five points.

It’s a Microsoft Word document, apparently containing controversial malware Peals.F!plock. Little is known about this, other than Security Essentials flagging it but others say it’s a false positive. Well someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to sent it a “false positive”.

The messages all claim to come from “Stephanie Greaves”, sgreaves at btros.co.uk, with a fixed subject of COS007202, which is unusual. You’d have thought that if you’re using a clean botnet you’d randomise things a bit. This is a genuine domain name (with no SPF – come on guys!) and for all I know, Stephanie Greaves is the name of a genuine victim. Their MX is a virtual server and they’re probably wondering why it’s been heavily loaded since 9am.

Whoever’s doing this has a pretty comprehensive spamming list, containing nearly all of my honeypots.

Update:

This same malware is now being sent out claiming to be from customerservices@ocado.com with the subject “Your receipt for today’s Ocado delivery”, and an HTML message looking like an Ocado receipt (as far as I can tell – I shop for my own groceries!) Again, Ocado doesn’t seem to have SPF set up.

The message text is:


 

HERE’S YOUR RECEIPT

Hello

Your receipt for today’s delivery is attached to this email. I’ll be delivering your 12:00-14:00 order and, so you’ll know it’s me, I’ll be driving the Lemon van.

Your order doesn’t have any substitutions, everything’s there.

See you later,

Paul

 


The fake bombardier one reads:

Good morning,
Please see attached purchase order.
Kind regards,
Stephanie Greaves
cid:image002.jpg@01D01077.BAC48BA0
Administration Apprentice
Bombardier Transportation (Rolling Stock) UK Ltd
Electronics, Cabling, & Interior Division
Litchurch Lane, Derby, DE24 8AD

 

Update: 20-Oct-15 11:22

The malware spam now looks like this:

From: Shaun Buzzard <shaunb@hubbardproducts.com>
To: <to_addr}}>  <-- Note error
Subject: Order

Hi ,

Please find attached order.

 

Kind regards.

Shaun Buzzard

 

 

Obama to end cyber-attacks

American president Barack Obama is so hacked off with cyber-attacks on US companies (and other interests) that he’s taken a step sure to send the perpetrators running for cover. In an executive order on the 1st of April, he created a new sanctions authority to have a go at anyone attacking the USA. In the statement announcing it he is quoted as saying “Cyber threats pose one of the most serious economic and national security challenges to the United States, and my administration is pursuing a comprehensive strategy to confront them”, describing it as a “national emergency”

Basically it gives the US Treasury Department to freeze the assets of any hackers suspected of attacking the US, in much the same way as it brings peace to places the Middle East and Ukraine. The criminals behind these attacks are no doubt quaking in their sneakers.

The decision to blame North Korea for the Sony attack told the world that the administration was getting tough, never mind the facts. And the Chinese, of course, deny state-sponsored naughtiness on an apparently daily basis.

The problem is, of course, that it’s somewhat difficult to actually figure out who’s behind an attack. Working out where an attack comes from is possible, and it’s usually from some hijacked computers used to obfuscate the origin. China and various other countries have a higher installed base of pirated software, which often comes with a built-in botnet, so of course attacks come from these places.

Initial opinion in the USA is divided between the law-makers, politicians and the non-technical cyber-security industry heralding it as the beginning of the end for international espionage gangs, and those of us who know now it works wondering if this is an April Fool.

One point I find intriguing, however, is whether this will have an effect on patent disputes. Apparently they’re worried about, and plan to apply these powers to, intellectual property theft. It seems to me that if some technology turned up in a competitor’s product and the American company went crying to the authorities they could have sanctions imposed on the foreign company, without any reasonable way of proving that any theft had taken place – or even who had it first. It could get messy.

 

 

Botnet shows itself with New Year spam :)

The crims have been at it again this Christmas season (more elsewhere). The latest interesting activity has been a flood of emails with :) as the subject and “Happy new year !” as the text-only payload. Don’t feel left out if you didn’t get one, as they’re only being sent to email addresses made of random numbers at various domains I monitor.

What are the crims up to? Probably testing out mail servers to see if they’ll accept things to random addresses. Every domain should, and deliver them to a human postmaster (not that many net newbies are even aware of this rule). However, there’s nothing to say they can’t also go to analysis tools.

What makes this latest caper interesting is that the botnet they’re coming from doesn’t show up on the usual lists of such things – it’s either new or extended rapidly from an old one. New botnets popping up after Christmas aren’t uncommon as the seasonal fake greeting cards and amazon purchase confirmation trojans are relentless in the days before, together with the lack of staff available over the holiday to deal with them. However, I find this one unusual as most of the IP addresses used to send out the probes are from Europe (Germany and Spain in particular).

 

South Korea attacked from Chinese IP address so it must be North Korea

On Wednesday, South Korea’s government said a malicious code from unknown hackers caused “massive” computer network failures at several banks, the police and TV stations. ATM machines ceased to function. The South Koreans seemed fairly quick to blame it all on the nasty people from the North.

This morning I woke up to the news that the attacks originated from an IP address in China; “apparently” it’s a favourite tactic of the North Koreans to work indirectly through Chinese IP addresses to cover their tracks.

The whole story is starting to pong.

Facts are scarce, but the suspicion is that that this malware was distributed by email in the traditional manner, using files called ‘KBS.EXE’ and ‘MBC.EXE’ (Page in Korean but you can get Google to translate). This doesn’t sound like a targeted attack on critical infrastructure, it sounds like a standard malware delivery to PCs. It’s claimed that the malware activated on Wednesday and wiped the hard disks, displayed skulls and so on. It possible, but another explanation is that malware often attempts to install itself on the boot partition and sometimes goes wrong, leading the luser to believe the disk has been maliciously wiped when in fact it’s just been made inaccessible accidentally, and it won’t boot. The synchronised timing could be accounted for by a botnet software upgrade that didn’t work as expected.

Now let’s consider the “plot”: To knock out critical South Korean infrastructure. If you wished to disrupt the Internet, that’s what you’d have to attack; not the endpoint PCs. Attacking PCs simply inconveniences individual users rather than taking down an organisation. The suggestion that an email virus could take down the ATM network is, frankly, ridiculous. How do you kill an ATM machine by emailing it? Or the bank’s mainframe? If there was ATM disruption, it could have been a side-effect of botnet traffic gone wild, but to say it was targeting the ATM network needs evidence to back it up before I’d take it remotely seriously. A DDoS attack may be possible if it’s not isolated from the Internet, but if that were true they were being very lax about things, and reports are talking about PC malware, NOT a DDoS attack.

And what of the attacking IP address traced back to China? No surprise there. China is botnet central. To be blunt, a lot of the software used on private computers in China is bootleg, which means it’s either supplied with botnet software pre-loaded, or isn’t able to receive security updates from Microsoft making it easy prey. It’s no coincidence that the incidence of zombie computers is higher in countries where interlectual property rights are less vigorously enforced, and that part of the world is a case in point. So, whilst it’s true that North Koreans would use botnets based in China, it also a meaningless statement. Everyone uses botnets based in China and the Far East.

Reports could be wrong, of course. This could be a DDoS attack against the South Korean Internet in general, and specific high profile targets. However, this does not square with the malware reports of computers not booting, and “skulls appearing on screens”.

The whole thing pongs. Here’s my theory: Social engineering emails were used to distribute malware in South Korea. Because the criminals were using emails in Korean, only Korea was affected. Either maliciously, or more likely through incompetence, the malware tried to install some botnet software and broke a number of PCs. The news media in Korea has been quick to blame this on a sinister North Korean plot, and the world’s media has picked this up as a story without enough people sanity-checking the whole scenario.

Red October or Red Herring

Kaspersky Labs has announced that someone had been conducting a hitherto unknown campaign wide-scale international espionage, dubbed Red October, for many years. Except it that I don’t think it has.

The story broke quietly on Friday in the Washington Post and has been repeated over some Internet news sites and blogs, almost verbatim, yesterday and today. Although keen for breaking news (especially where international intrigue is concerned), one should really take a step back and match the claims with the substance.

You can find the report here, although not the the Kaspersky site. It’s not the subject of any press release I’ve seen. No one could be contacted at Kaspersky for comment. Hmm. Specialist IT security sites, like Steve Gold’s IT Security Pro, aren’t treating this as a top story either. The only reason I’m hitting the keyboard is that people keep drawing it to my attention.

The report (assuming it isn’t a hoax) does contain a good analysis of what appears to be a new-ish botnet, although one that’s not very widespread (we’re not talking about Flame V2 here). Kaspersky has a lot of smart cookies working for them, and they do some very valuable research, but reading the posts on the subject you’d think they’d uncovered the next Watergate or similar. Perhaps they have, but all I’m seeing details so far  is of another botnet.

If their analysis is correct, the perpetrators do seem to be targeting government and diplomatic sites in particular, but this isn’t actually novel. They’ve identified targets in most of the developed world, with the interesting exception of England and China. As the code appears to be of Russian origin, and not particularly well obfuscated, it’s also noteworthy that the majority of the attacks have been launched against Russian targets.

So, as it stands, this looks like a competent investigations of a botnet. Well done Kaspersky. Now lets get some sleep.

 

New Botnet?

Over the last 24-hours I’ve intercepted several emails containing malicious attachments in .zip files. There’s nothing odd about that, expect these are coming from ‘clean’ IP addresess.

Is this a new Botnet, spreading fast?

Yesterday the subject was “your mailbox has been deactivated” and they pretended to come from the IT support team at your domain name. If you don’t have an IT support team it’s a bit of a giveaway. The message continued:

We are contacting you in regards an unusual activity that was identified in your mailbox. As a result, your mailbox has been deactivated. To restore your mailbox, you are required to extract and run the attached mailbox utility.

Best regards, technical support.

Today they’ve got the subject “Payment request from , where the company varies.

The full text is:

We recorded a payment request from "" to enable the charge of $ on your account.

The payment is pending for the moment.

If you made this transaction or if you just authorize this payment, please ignore or remove this email message. The transaction will be shown on your monthly statement as "".

If you didn't make this payment and would like to decline it, please download and install the transaction inspector module (attached to this letter).

The interesting thing is that none of these have come from IP addresses that are currently listed as part of a botnet, known spam sources or anything. They’re completely clean. I’ve no proof that the two attacks are related, but I’m suspicious.

If anyone has more parts to the jigsaw, please share them with a comment.