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[pureh@te]

Weird internet behavior. What's going on?

Sûnnet Beskerming researchers observed an interesting deviation in global network traffic over the last 24 hours, particularly for South American, Asian, and Australian networks. Normally, global Internet traffic (as observed by the Internet Traffic Report) oscillates around nine per cent packet loss, with global response times of 138 ms, and the internally derived traffic index at around 79.

Sustained over the last 24 hours, the traffic index has dipped almost five per cent, packet loss has climbed to 11 per cent, and the global response time to almost 150 ms.

Normal spikes and dips as observed on the Internet Traffic Report show up as no more than three- or four-hour blocks of odd results before settling back into normalcy. This latest spike and dip has been sustained for at least 18 hours, with a rapid ramp up in the six hours prior to the peaks (and lows) being reached.

When the figures are considered against the seven-day average, and the 30-day average, the deviation appears to be quite significant and seems to mark a distinct event or set of events. When the reports for Asia, South America, and Australia are looked at in isolation, the three regions appear to be suffering from a related event, with similar patterns being observed in the data being put forward for those regions. Data for Europe and North America indicates that whatever is affecting the other regions, it isn't affecting Europe or North America. Independently sourced data at Keynote (using their Internet Health Report) indicates that there is nothing adversely impacting the US at this time.

Either these regions are experiencing the first stages of a global event, or they contain networks that are under a sustained attack for some specific reason.

So, what can be causing this problem? There appears to be nothing that is being reported by any of the usual agencies or news feeds, with SANS indicating a GREEN Threat level, and Symantec, McAfee, and the other major security software providers not indicating any new malicious software emergence.

Looking at the current Top 10 report from SANS, it appears that Port 5901 (used for VNC) is leading the charge for the top rating across all metrics (including a 20 per cent lead on the next port on the rising Trends chart). At the time of writing, the raw data for Port 5901 was showing disturbing results.

While there is spam, drive-by phishing attacks, and persistent worms attacking global networks, these have been ongoing attacks and should not be responsible for such a large change in such a short period of time by themselves.

If we consider port 5901 to be relevant to the reason behind the attacks, then we might have found a potential cause, and a potential target.

An exploit was added a couple of days ago to a number of security mailing lists, distribution sites, and other sources, which targets a remote code execution vulnerability in the AMX VNC ActiveX control. Since appearing on these sources it has spread to thousands of sites, and is guaranteed to have been seen by many, many people - some with malicious intent.

Although a remote code execution exploit is nothing special nowadays, this particular piece of code claims to achieve its goals without alerting the victim to the fact that they have just been successfully hacked.

Whether or not it is relevant to the real reason behind the observed response time and packet loss deviation will be seen over time. At the least, administrators and end users should keep a closer eye on their systems and networks over the next few days to see if this unknown problem is going to spread.

Sûnnet Beskerming Pty. Ltd

[pureh@te]

Rival malware gangs wage turf war
DDoSing the enemy
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco → More by this author
Published Sunday 1st July 2007 07:02 GMT
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Security researchers have uncovered evidence of a turf war between rival criminal enterprises connected to two of the most sophisticated malware toolkits in current use.

Like competing gangs in the Mafia - for those who followed the HBO series The Sopranos, think the New York-based Lupertazzi crime family and its sometimes enemy the DiMeo crime family, which Tony Soprano ran from New Jersey - the malware groups are fighting for turf and control.
Click here to find out more!

But rather than clashing over who gets to skim money off a garbage collection contract or a major construction project, the cyber criminals are battling to own tens of thousands of compromised computers.

Enter the propagators of a piece of malware Symantec dubs Trojan.Srizbi, one of a handful programs spread by the MPack attack kit. A trojan that makes infected computers part of a botnet that churns out spam, Srizbi is also known to uninstall competing spam malware being spread by another nasty piece of malware dubbed the Storm Worm.

"The Storm Worm criminals appear to have taken exception to that," says Lawrence Baldwin, a malware researcher who has recently observed Storm zombies DDoSing the server Srizbi uses to download installation files. Baldwin is unable to estimate how much traffic the Storm bots are sending to the Srizbi server, but he says attempts to get an infected machine in his lab to update the Storm malware makes him believe the attack is significant.

"All day we've been trying to make that work, and it's not happening," Baldwin said in an interview. "Whatever amount of activity they're shoving at those servers, it appears to be sufficient enough to prevent their downloader from getting a new version of the MPack spam malware."

The rival attack kits are examples of the strides criminals have made in developing highly sophisticated software that makes detection and eradication increasingly difficult.

In one camp is the MPack attack kit. Earlier this month, it became a force to be reckoned with after it enabled crooks to hijack more than 10,000 websites in just a few days. The kit is a professionally developed collection of back-end web components built on PHP that bundles together many different malware tools.

Among other things, it logs detailed information about the computers it attacks, including the IP addresses of machines it has infected and what exploits a particular user is vulnerable to. A gang in Russia is believed to sell the kit, according to Symantec.

Not to be outdone is the Storm Worm, which got its name after an early version of the malware spread through mass email promising information about winter storms that ravaged Northern Europe in January. Because Storm employs a peer-to-peer protocol, its command and control center is highly decentralized, making it difficult to shut down.

As we reported earlier, a recent version of the Storm Trojan (technically, it's not a worm) comes disguised as an e-postcard but actually recruits zombies for a botnet. The malware is highly resourceful, scanning a victim machine first for a javascript vulnerability, and if that doesn't work, moves on to try one of three other exploits.

Only about 25 per cent of the anti-virus scanners detected the Trojan when the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center recently ran it through 30 different security programs.

According to Baldwin, who has acquired copies of the latest Storm Trojan and has been observing it in his lab, the malware has been working overtime lately.

"We believe the same system we were running [and infected by the Storm Trojan] was simultaneously running the ecard scam and DDoSing competitors," he says. ®



I was thinking maby we should have a current news/security related thread

[Duritoxn]

Thanks for sharing these purehate. Do we have permission to repost them in a forum instance?

If you are interested in security news, have you tried listening to the two minute warning?

2mw[dot]mcafee[dot]com

Check it out.