What about the botnets?!

Botnets are a huge problem for a number of reasons. Not only are they used to send spam, they’re also used in criminal activities. One of the major challenges in dealing with botnets is finding and stopping the people who create and use them. Why? Because the internet is global and crime tends to be prosecuted within local jurisdictions.

White Collar Crime.
Catching someone running a botnet, or involved in crime online in general, requires cooperation from authorities in multiple jurisdictions. Police, lawyers, and other officials have had to create relationships to work together, all while respecting international law. It’s a involved and complicated process, and that’s before we talk about the challenges in actually figuring out who is running the botnet. Subject matter experts, like operating system manufacturers or anti-virus companies, are also part of the process in most cases. (Read about the Simda botnet takedown at Interpol)
Despite the challenges, botnets do get taken down and criminals do get arrested and brought to justice. Today the Department of Justice announced a guilty plea from a Russian citizen charged with infecting machines with malware.

Senakh and his co-conspirators used the Ebury botnet to generate and redirect internet traffic in furtherance of various click-fraud and spam e-mail schemes, which fraudulently generated millions of dollars in revenue. As part of the plea, Senakh admitted that he supported the criminal enterprise by creating accounts with domain registrars which helped build the Ebury botnet infrastructure and personally profited from traffic generated by the Ebury botnet.

Ebury is kinda interesting because it’s actually a Linux botnet, not a Windows one. It used a SSH exploit to get in, stole user credentials and then smuggled the credentials out in special TCP packets. CERT-BUND has some of the gritty technical details of what they discovered. And WeLiveSecurity also has a writeup on how the infection worked.
Botnets are a problem. Catching people is a long, drawn out challenge. But, it can be done.

Related Posts

Following the SMTP rules

An old blog post from 2013, that’s still relevant today.
“Blocked for Bot-like Behavior”
An ESP asked about this error message from Hotmail and what to do about it.
“Bot-like” behaviour usually means the sending server is doing something that bots also do. It’s not always that they’re spamming, often it’s a technical issue. But the technical problems make the sending server look like a bot, so the ISP is not taking any chances and they’re going to stop accepting mail from that server.
If you’re an ESP what should you look for when tracking down what the problem is?
First make sure your server isn’t infected with anything and that you’re not running an open relay or proxy. Second, make sure your customers aren’t compromised or have had their accounts hijacked.
Then start looking at your configuration.
HELO/EHLO values

Read More

Anatomy of a successful phishing attempt

Earlier this year the Exploratorium was the victim of a phishing attack. They’ve posted an article on what happened and how they discovered and dealt with the issue.
But they didn’t just report on the attack, they dissected it. And, as is appropriate for a organization with a mission of education, they mapped out what they discovered during the investigation.

There are a couple of things that stand out to me about this attack. One is that of the more interesting pieces to me is that there was a delay between the compromise and the start of the attack. The Exploratorium calls it “the pivot” and describes it as the hacker deciding what to do next. The second is that the phisher actively interacted with the victim’s account. All new mail was sent to the trash automatically so she wouldn’t see incoming mail. Some mail was actively replied to so more people would click on the message. The phisher took steps to retain access to the account for as long as possible.
One thing that the Exploratorium didn’t see was any actual access to Exploratorium files or information. That may be because the Exploratorium itself wasn’t the target. Once a phisher / hacker has access to the email account, they have access to almost everything in your online life: calendars, bank accounts, credit accounts, the list goes on. Email addresses are our online identity and getting access to the address can open access to so much more.
Quite frankly it can happen to any of us. Earlier this week we received a phishing message that looked very plausible. It came from a law firm, mentioned a subpoena and even had an attachment personalized to our company. The attachment wasn’t opened so we were fine, but I can see how that kind of email might trick someone into getting infected.
We all need to be careful online. Email is a wonderful thing, but it’s insecure. It’s a great way for criminals to get into our space and wreck havoc on our computers and our lives.
 

Read More

Whirlwind that is M3AAWG

It’s been a great conference, and it’s only about half done. As is common at these conferences, I write down lots of things we should do and need to publish. The difference is now that we are growing I may have the time to put the polish on them and get them published.
Today’s keynote discussed the economics of botnet mitigation. Michel van Eeten from Delft University of Technology presented information compiled from some different datasets about botnets.
Good news
Botnet infection rates are relatively stable. They’ve not spiraled out of control like some people were predicting.
Interesting news
More than 50% of bot infections are contained on 50 ISPs in the entire world.
Bad news
Centers set up specifically to fix botnet infections don’t really have a big impact on infection cure rate.
Good news
ISP actions and walled gardens do have an impact on infection cure rates.
The biggest take away from the session is that ISPs are critical in both protecting from infection and helping users cure infection once it happens.

Read More