Month: March 2009

The BBC botnet debacle

There is an active thread over at Funsec on a very interesting subject:  The BBC’s recent use of a botnet for a televised story.

The BBC wanted to show how botnets work.  Unfortunately, they took control of a real live botnet.  Real people’s computers.  To send spam to a couple of web email accounts they had set up. 

They then put a desktop wallpaper on the infected systems, telling them that they were infected, and then they disabled the botnet.

This is wrong on so many levels.  And it sets a dangerous precedent.

Larry Seltzer at eWeek has written an excellent piece on the subject

I can expound a bit, Yes, it’s illegal.  You can parse it any way you want, but you do not take control of other systems without the permission of the users.  Period.  

But the legal argument is only one part of it. It’s unethical.

Malware researchers routinely deal with botnets for analysis purposes.  It would be considered a high crime indeed to allow a spambot to actually send spam to the outside world, even for “testing” purposes. And, shutting down a botnet yourself, even with the best intentions, is simply not a good idea.  You don’t know what accidental harm you may cause.  You don’t really know what’s on the user’s system that will simply restart the whole process.  

You just don’t get involved, because it’s not only wrong, there are too many unintended consequences that can occur.  You’re playing with fire.  Report it to the ISP, report it to the relevant authorities, but don’t play with live ammo like this. 

To have a TV show use a botnet, to “prove a point”,  is beyond the pale — particularly since the point could have easily been proven it in other ways.  

The company that helped the BBC should have put the brakes on this idea.  However, it was the BBC reporter that ultimately pulled the trigger.

Graham Cluley (a rising star in the security blogging world) has done the work so I don’t have to, and you can read more at his blog post here; and Dave Harley has done some good writing as well here.

Alex Eckelberry

More Facebook malware…

If you’re invited to watch a movie on Facebook, realize that downloading a “special codec” or “media player” is ill-advised. It’s malware.

Example running right now:

Messages from Your Friends on Facebook, March 11, 2009

You have 1 Personal Message:
Video title: “Amanda is dancing on Striptease Dance Party, March 13, 2009! We’re absolutely shocked!”.

Proceed to view full video message:

hxxp://facebook.shared.completeserv.personalid-5ihg4wefb.based.867player com/home.htm?/tools/application=e1q3flwixa7lkef

Message ID: FB-7n1cqla9sgguzde
2009 Facebook community, Message Center.

Facebook123888

When you try to view the “video”, you’re asked to download and run a “media player”. That’s the malware part.

This has been reported to Facebook.

Alex Eckelberry

MX-Virtualization announced

Today, we announced MX-Virtualization, our new detection technology which analyses potential malware based on behavior.  I mentioned this in a blog post a while back, and now it’s official.

If you’re running VIPRE or CounterSpy (enterprise and consumer versions), you already have MX-V.  It started shipping with the definition series 5000.

MX-V is really quite powerful.  We’ll be talking more more about it in the coming weeks.

You can read more about it in our official company hype, here.

Alex Eckelberry

Heuristics are dead?

Some people in the security industry may be baffled by a video presented by Richard Steinnon with Amrit Williams, Martin McKeay and Mike Murray.

The discussion is going along predictably and with some good points (like whitelisting isn’t practical), but at the 17:45 minute mark, the odd statement is made the heuristics and behavioral detections don’t work.

This statement directly contradicts fact.

Many of the leading AV engines are, in fact, relying heavily on generic detections and heuristics (some that come to mind include Sophos, Avira, Symantec, and one of the great users of heuristics, ESET). Go ahead and grab a piece of malware, submit it to Virustotal, and see how many detections are things like “trojan.gen”, “delphi.gen”, “troj.heur.downloader”, or “trojan.packed.gen” . These are generic or heuristic detections. And there’s a lot of them.

As far as I’m concerned, just about the only thing an AV company can do these days is to lean heavily on heuristics or behavioral detections. When you’re processing over 30,000 pieces of malware daily, there’s not much choice.

We’re certainly pushing in that direction. As an example, some preliminary test results of our upcoming MX-V virtualization technology (which is almost purely behavioral) are showing detections of almost a quarter of our entire malware repository. That’s pretty powerful, and this is a behavioral system. There are no signficant issues with false positives, either.

Similarly lambasted in the video is Host Intrusion Prevention (HIPS). Well, it’s not very relevant in a 64–bit world, but in a 32–bit world, one thing HIPS can do is block an attempt by an application to write to a place in memory where it’s not supposed to (a buffer overflow). Seems like a good idea to me. Or IDS, which relies on rules that are the writer’s best approximation of a means to detect a certain type of network event.

As my good friend Randy Abrams over at ESET said:

A battle for the industry is that customers want names for the things that are detected. It isn’t feasible anymore to maintain names for all of the threats. The entire industry has been forced to adopt heuristic approaches that preclude naming each threat…In many cases heuristics are being called signatures. Generic signatures are a type of heuristic and are used with reasonably good success. When the storm worm was at its peak it was being dynamically repackaged every 5 minutes. Generic signatures were able to protect against these threats without the need for a unique signature for each variant.

I invite the curious to spend some time in an AV lab. Fair warning, however: As in legislation and sausages, you might not want to watch the process.

Alex Eckelberry

(I may get called on this by someone, so I might as well get it out of the way: My statements partially depend upon the definition of signature, heuristic and behavior detections. Generic detection, which has typically been a detection for a family, has in practice broadened to include practically any detection that matches various attributes or file types (like blacklisting a packer). But to some, a heuristic must have at least two qualifying flags to qualify. To me, it’s simple: if you’re doing an exact match of a file hash, a string, etc., it’s a signature. You can tell a customer exactly what the file is, and you have certainty when removing it from a system. However, if you’re guessing based on entry points, file types, attributes, etc., it’s a heuristic. And if you’re detecting based on behavior, well, it’s behavioral.)