Inside the botnets that never make the news

by Dancho Danchev  |  May 20, 2009 12:00pm PDT  |  Image 1 of 26

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Small Targeted Botnet

This screenshot is a great example of the social networking activities taking place inside the cybercrime ecosystem. The modest botnet consisting of 78 infected hosts has a LOL (abbreviation for laughing out loud) sign added by a competing botnet master aiming to expose a scammer pretending to have a much bigger botnet.
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RE: Botnet exploiting MS0867 flaws (Inside the botnets that never make the news)
angle7575@... 1st Oct 2009
you cant block IRC channles many people use thous channles for legit reason like some of the good mmorpg Games that we have on the net.
and other websit that provide you with music use the IRC world so doing that is only gonna cut people nose off
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Block IRC traffic completely
zenotek 21st May 2009
That's the solution. IRC traffic has no place in
business environments.
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How pray tell?
rjacksix 21st May 2009
You're forgetting, any type of traffic can go over any port. It is not a simple firewall rule. It either requires deep packet inspection (which doesn't do any good if it is SSH'ed, or a lot of manual labor. Your premise is right, but "the devil is in the details."
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True
phatkat 22nd May 2009
Yes, devil is in the details. This will take some substantial resources to inspect all of packets as they come in though your normally open ports to prevent these botnet from controlling your system if they are infected by any botnet.
Not getting the bot in your system in the first place a better method than trying to thwart the botmaster from getting to your afterwards.
If you have no bot then most likely the botmaster will not control anything.
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Excuse me, but what is a "BOT"? Anybody
AA0POTOM@... 9th Jun 2009
Excuse me, but what is a "BOT"? Anybody have a simple answer for a simple minded person like me.

Thanks,


Tom
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this post.
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IRC can be set to use literally ANY port, not just the well-publicised ports that are used by most casual IRC users. The same problem occurs when you block known IRC hosts (either by domain or IP range) - all you're doing is blocking the major IRC nets. Botnet operators can set up their own servers/nets, using IRC server 'ware available for free for just about any OS.

Stateful packet inspection's the only viable method, and this gets expensive in terms of processing power needed to scan each inbound and outbound packet. You CAN impose the CIS version of Social Engineering with a "Thou Shalt Not" edict, but unless you have a method of catching someone breaking it, it's hard to enforce.

It's better to close the vulnerabilities at the point of infection/subversion, by aggressive anti-malware scanning, IM proxy servers, or straight-up blocking of the software from the desktops via a GPO.
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Exactly how we did it....
JCitizen 21st May 2009
except we needed to do more application patching to reduce our software vulnerability posture.
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Image 5...
Steve Goldman 21st May 2009
Did you do the obfuscating? If not, how do you know they're all on the same server?
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No honor among thieves.
phatkat 22nd May 2009
I like the slide of a copyright disclaimer for one of the botnets.
"Botnet with anti RIAA, anti-piracy disclaimer".
Who is this person going to call any violation of this policy, the "Ghostbusters"?
It is interesting that all of them are using some IRC application so if you wanted to stop them you need to stop illicit IRC traffic.
you cant block IRC channles many people use thous channles for legit reason like some of the good mmorpg Games that we have on the net.
and other websit that provide you with music use the IRC world so doing that is only gonna cut people nose off

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ie8 fix

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