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PC Users Play 'Dodge the Hacker'
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Thursday, June 10, 2004; 9:38 AM
The latest hacker flare-ups are going after the same flaw that the Sasser worm exploited. "Sasser put a spotlight on yet another security hole in Microsoft's Windows computer operating system by knocking down business, government and transportation systems around the globe. Now, in what is becoming a familiar pattern, attackers have launched a steady stream of smaller-scale assaults, looking to break into Windows PCs exhibiting the same vulnerability exploited by Sasser," USA Today reported today. "Attackers are having a field day with this one flaw," Ed Skoudis, co-founder of Internet security firm Intelguardians, told the paper.
More from the article: "The weapons of choice: self-propagating worms, more refined and invasive than the fast-spreading, but otherwise relatively benign, Sasser. Attackers also are increasing deployment of powerful stealth programs, called bots, designed to turn a compromised PC into an obedient soldier awaiting orders to broadcast spam or steal log-ins. What's more, hacking specialists, dubbed bot-herders, are assembling bot armies of thousands of compromised machines and using them to extort protection money from gambling Web sites. They do this by threatening to dispatch a bot army to flood a Web site with bogus requests so it can't transact bets."
Just this week, Kaspersky Labs "intercepted a new virus threat called Plexus which spreads through local networks and the internet as an attachment to infected emails, according to the Russian anti-virus firm," The Sydney Morning Herald's online edition reported. "The worm spreads in three different ways: as an email attachment, via file-sharing networks and using the LSASS and RPC DCOM vulnerabilities in MS Windows which previous worms like Sasser and Lovesan did, it has warned." McAfee also has information on Plexus on its site, along with a list of newly discovered threats like the Korgo e-mail worm.
More from Seltzer: "Just the other day Kaspersky Labs wrote up a dire warning about the new Plexus.a worm that combines the usual mail and network share infection routes with exploits of the LSASS and DCOM vulnerabilities. Given that multiple individual worms exist that use these techniques individually, I fail to see why one worm that uses multiples of them is anything new to be scared of... And it's only going to get harder for these worms. As I've written before, some form of SMTP authentication is coming, and one thing it is likely to do is to kill off the existing generation of mail worms, which should no longer even reach the destination mail server. It's conceivable that worm authors could employ new techniques to get their messages authenticated, but it still won't be the same for them. With no spoofing, it will be easier to track them down and alert infected users." eWeek.com has a package of articles on e-mail worms in 2004.
The company also has been vigilant about hunting down hackers. "When indications of a worm exploiting the LSASS vulnerability in Windows surfaced April 30, the staff at Microsoft Corp.'s Security Response Center didn't hesitate; they knew exactly what to do. Within an hour of the first reports of the worm, which would later come to be known as Sasser, Kevin Kean was on a conference call with the company's internal penetration testers, field representatives and partners in the Virus Information Alliance. The group went over details to determine whether the threat was serious enough to call out the heavy hitters and move into what's known as 'immediate response' phase," eWeek reported. "From there, the chase was on. Microsoft's internal analysts and security and forensics experts worked around the clock with the help of law enforcement officials and outside specialists to analyze Sasser code, searching for any clue that might lead them to the worm's creator. And in this case, after a week of long hours, hard work and not a little bit of luck, the effort paid off with the arrest and indictment of an 18-year-old German man who authorities say has confessed to writing not only Sasser but the Netsky family of viruses as well."
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