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First of all, we need to understand what a botnet or zombie network is. A botnet is a network of computers made up of machines infected with a malicious backdoor program. The backdoor enables cybercriminals to remotely control the infected computers (which may mean controlling an individual machine, some of the computers making up the network or the entire network). Malicious backdoor programs that are specifically designed for use in creating botnets are called bots.

They are used as a powerful cyber weapon and are an effective tool for making money illegally. The owner of a botnet can control the computers which form the network from anywhere in the world — from another city, country or even another continent. Importantly, the Internet is structured in such a way that a botnet can be controlled anonymously.

When bots are controlled directly, the cybercriminal establishes a connection with an infected computer and manages it by using commands built into the bot program. In the case of indirect control, the bot connects to the control center or other machines on the network, sends a request and then performs the command which is returned.

Botnets can be used by cybercriminals to conduct a wide range of criminal activity, from sending spam to attacking government networks. It should be noted that spam is not always sent by botnet owners: botnets are often rented by spammers.

The second most popular method of making money via botnets is to use tens or even hundreds of thousands of computers to conduct DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. This involves sending a stream of false requests from bot-infected machines to the web server under attack.

Botnets help increase the haul of passwords (passwords to email and ICQ accounts, FTP resources, web services etc.) and other confidential user data by a factor of a thousand.

It can also be used to infect the computer with other malicious programs (such as viruses or worms) and install other bots on the computer.

Flood: start creating a stream of false requests to a specific Internet server in order to make it fail or to overload channels in a specific segment of the Internet.

Types of botnet Today’s botnet classification is relatively simple, and uses botnet architecture the protocols used to control bots as a basis. In practice, building decentralized botnets is not an easy task, since each newly infected computer needs to be provided with a list of bots to which it will connect on the zombie network.

Classification of botnets according to network protocols For a botnet owner to be able to send commands to a bot, it is essential that a network connection be established between the zombie machine and the computer transmitting commands to it.

NetBus and BackOrifice2000 were the first to include a complete set of functions that made it possible to remotely administer infected computers, enabling cybercriminals to perform file operations on remote machines, launch new programs, make screenshots, open or close CD-ROM drives, etc.

A malicious user then came up with the idea that computers infected with backdoors should establish connections themselves and that they should always be visible online (on the condition that the machine is switched on and working). This user must almost certainly have been a hacker, because new-generation bots employed a communication channel traditionally used by hackers — IRC (Internet Relay Chat). It is also likely that the development of new bots was made easier by the fact that bots working in the IRC system were open source (even though these bots were not designed for remote administration purposes but to respond to user requests such as questions about the weather or when another user had last appeared in chat). When infecting a computer, the new bots connected to IRC servers on a predefined IRC channel as visitors and waited for messages from the botnet owner. The owner could come online at any time, view the list of bots, send commands to all infected computers at once or send a private message to one infected machine. This was the original mechanism for implementing a centralized botnet, which was later christened C&C (Command & Control Center).

Developing such bots was not difficult because the IRC protocol has simple syntax. A specialized client program is not required to use an IRC server — a universal network client, such as Netcat or Telnet, can be used.

Information about the new IRC botnets spread rapidly. This was done by seizing control of the network, redirecting bots to other, password-protected, IRC channels and the result was full control over somebody else’s network of infected machines.

First, hackers developed tools for remotely controlling servers based on such popular script engines as Perl and PHP or, more rarely, ASP, JSP and a few others. Then somebody developed a method by which a computer on a local area network could connect to a server on the Internet; this made it possible to control the computer from anywhere in the world. Descriptions of the method for remotely controlling computers on local area networks which bypassed such protection as proxy servers and NAT were published online and it soon became popular in certain circles.

The development of semi-legitimate remote administration tools that could be used to evade protection on machines in local area networks and to gain remote access to such computers paved the way for web-oriented botnets. It is difficult to register a large number of accounts automatically as systems which protect against automated registrations are constantly modified. It turned out that botnets with classic architecture (i.e. a large number of bots with one command and control center) are very vulnerable, since they depend on a critical node — the command and control center.

All that the zombie network’s owner needs to do is send a command to one of the computers on the network, and the bots will spread the command to other computers in the botnet automatically.

P2P botnets The Storm Botnet In 2007, the attention of security researchers was attracted by a P2P botnet created using a malicious program known as the Storm Worm. Authors of the Storm Worm were spreading their creation so rapidly that it seems as though they had set up a conveyor belt to create new versions of the malicious program. From January 2007 onwards, we have detected between three and five new Storm Worm (Kaspersky Lab classifies it as Email-Worm.Win32.Zhelatin) variants a day.

Clearly, the bot is being developed and distributed by professionals, and both the zombie network architecture and its defense are well-designed.

Mayday Mayday is another interesting botnet and it technically differs slightly from its forerunners. Network size is not the only criterion in which Mayday is inferior to its ‘big brother’ Storm: the Mayday botnet uses a non-encrypted network communication protocol, the malicious code has not been tweaked to hinder analysis by antivirus software and, most importantly, new bot variants are not released with anything nearing the frequency we saw with new variants of the Storm Worm. Backdoor.Win32.Mayday was first detected by Kaspersky Lab in late November 2007, and since then just over 20 different variants of the malicious program have made it into our collection. Most users are familiar with ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) because it is used by the PING utility to check whether a network host is accessible. Command and control centers of web-oriented botnets use a mechanism known as CGI (Common Gateway Interface).
Kaspersky Lab did not detect any new variants of the Mayday bot in spring 2008. Perhaps the malicious program’s authors have taken a timeout and the Mayday botnet will resurface in the near future.

The botnet business The answer to the question why botnets keep evolving and why they are coming to pose an increasingly serious threat lies in the underground market that has sprung up around them. Today, cybercriminals need neither specialized knowledge nor large amounts of money to get access to a botnet. The underground botnet industry provides everyone who wants to use a botnet with everything they need, including software, ready-to-use zombie networks and anonymous hosting services, at low prices.

Let’s take a look at the ‘dark side’ of the Internet and see how the botnet industry works to benefit zombie network owners. The first thing needed to create a botnet is a bot, i.e. a program that can remotely perform certain actions on a user’s computer without the user’s knowledge. Software for creating botnets can be easily purchased on the Internet by simply finding a appropriate advertisement and contacting the advertiser. Bot prices vary from $5 to $1000, depending on how widespread a bot is, whether it is detected by antivirus products, what commands it supports, etc.

A simple web-oriented botnet requires a hosting site where a command and control center can be located. Such sites are readily available, and come complete with support and anonymous access to the server (providers of anonymous hosting services usually guarantee that log files will not be accessible to anybody, including law enforcement agencies). Since stealing botnets is a common practice, most buyers prefer to replace both the malicious programs and the command and control centers with their own, thereby gaining guaranteed control over the botnet. This ‘reloading’ of botnets is also helpful for protecting them and ensuring anonymity, since IT security experts may already be aware of the ‘old’ C&C and the ‘old’ bot. They infect the systems of users who visit a malicious web page by exploiting vulnerabilities in browsers or browser plugins. Sadly, these tools are so accessible that even adolescents can easily find them and they even try to make money by reselling them.

Interestingly, ExploitPacks were originally developed by Russian hackers but later they found an audience in other countries as well. These malicious programs have been localized (showing that they were commercially successful on the black market) and are now actively used in China, among other places. Developers of such systems as C&C software or ExploitPacks realize this and develop user-friendly installation and configuration mechanisms for their products in order to make them more popular and increase demand. For example, installation of a command and control center usually involves copying files onto a web server and using the browser to launch an install.php script.

It is well known in the cybercriminal world that sooner or later antivirus products will start detecting any bot program. When this happens, the infected machines on which an antivirus product is installed are lost to the cybercriminals, while the rate of new infections significantly deteriorates. Botnet owners use a number of methods to retain control of their networks, the most effective of which is protecting malicious programs from detection by processing the malicious code. The ability to gain access to a network of infected computers is determined by the amount of money cybercriminals have at their disposal rather than whether they have specialized knowledge. Such botnets can be used by governments or individuals to exert political pressure in tense situations.

In addition, anonymous control of infected machines that does not depend on their geographic location could be used to provoke cyber conflicts. Think of ten friends or acquaintances who have computers — out of the ten, one of them is likely to own a machine that is part of a zombie network.

http://www.viruslist.com/en/analysis?pubid=204792003

Incident response (IR) for many IT shops traditionally has been accomplished by cobbling together tools from various sources with a script-based tool that automates the collection of data from the suspect system. All manual incident response is slow response, says Kevin Mandia, president and CEO of Mandiant. A key driver for organizations dealing with incidents, especially those in the financial sector, Mandia says, is speed and minimizing exposure: The IR team must be able to quickly grab information about the incident, determine what’s happening, and respond appropriately to minimize collateral damage. And as industry regulations and legislation now require disclosure of data breaches, it’s increasingly important to handle incidents and internal investigations as quickly as possible.

Guidance Software, thanks to its success as a forensic software company, has been the major player in the enterprise incident response (IR) market for several years. Its Encase Enterprise product integrates IR and traditional forensic capabilities into one interface that’s familiar to users of the company’s standalone Encase Forensic product.

There are network event-focused tools arriving as well: Startup Packet Analytics, for instance, on Tuesday will emerge from stealth mode and roll out its new Net/FSE Network Forensic Search Engine software, which collects and organizes Cisco NetFlow and syslog log data into a searchable format, helping analysts to investigate breaches as soon as they occur.

Key features to consider in enterprise IR tools are the breadth of operating system support, what information can be collected, and whether it will complement current internal processes and tools. Collecting volatile data such as open ports, running processes, and contents of memory, is one key thing to consider when searching for an IR solution. If you conduct small internal investigations and computer forensics, most IR solutions can collect information in a way that can be easily analyzed by existing forensic products, or within the IR solution itself.

Chet Hosmer, senior vice president and chief scientist for WetStone Technologies, says that is one of the key features of WetStone’s LiveWire Investigator: quickly and accurately capturing volatile information, as well as performing acquisition in such a way that can be analyzed within its product, or plugged into other vendors’ tools.

Brian Karney, chief operating officer for AccessData, says internal investigations are a primary driver for companies researching, or that already have purchased, enterprise IR tools.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=143629&WT.svl=news2_1

Bananas.com was caught off guard last year. The musical instrument sales site suffered a data breach that was followed swiftly by a double whammy of consequences. Because its own resources were limited, Bananas referred victims to large credit-reporting agencies to monitor for subsequent financial damage from the breach. Despite its efforts, Bananas apparently failed to meet all the various state notification requirements and was subsequently slammed with fines and fees by major credit companies. The Bananas experience provides a hint of the turmoil a company can face as it tries to cope with disclosure requirements in the wake of a data breach.

With no imminent legislative relief in sight, corporations sometimes resort to blanketing customers with notifications after a breach — lobbing disclosures even in those states that don’t require them, simply to cover all bases. But this practice can have “unintended detrimental consequences,” says Robert Scott, managing partner at the Dallas office of Scott & Scott LLP, a law and IT services firm.

Studies have shown that most customers would take their business elsewhere if they received two or more security breach notices, says Scott. “When faced with a security incident, businesses should carefully determine who has been impacted, review their breach notification laws in the relevant states, and devise a breach notification strategy that satisfies the legal obligations and properly notifies affected consumers,” he says. Others are stepping up encryption efforts, since many states don’t force companies to disclose security incidents if the compromised data was encrypted.

In large companies, disclosure activity often involves multiple jurisdictions, such as the offices of the chief auditor, the chief compliance officer, the chief privacy officer and the chief technology officer or the CIO, says Joseph Rosem­baum, a partner at New York law firm Reed Smith LLP.

“Where responsibilities are partitioned across a diverse set of functions, each office may have the ability to provide greater focus on individual issues, but the challenge of coordination across multiple disciplines is more difficult,” Rosembaum notes. Moreover, it takes corporate vigilance to keep pace with so many differences in state disclosure laws — variations that start with notification triggers. “For some states, any breach that compromises the security or confidentiality of covered personal information triggers the obligation to notify the affected individuals,” notes Thomas Smedinghoff, a partner at Chicago law firm Wildman, Harrold.

For example, although one state might allow exemptions for compromises of encrypted data, “another state without such an exception would require a notice, even though the data was unreadable,” says Geoff Gray, a privacy and data security consultant at the Cyber Security Industry Alliance in Arlington, Va.

And as Bananas.com learned, the high cost of notification compliance doesn’t stop with the resources it takes to coordinate a response and alert customers. “We expanded upon legislation that only existed at the time in California and opted to make nationwide notification of potentially affected consumers, without any state or federal law requiring us to do so,” says Christopher Cwalina, ChoicePoint’s assistant general counsel and vice president for compliance.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=304931&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

“The risks that have been prevalent throughout the years have been mostly risks of Trojans being implanted, allowing individuals to come in and steal information or commit fraud,” Carpenito said.

With this in mind, vendors such as Gamma Enterprise Technologies and Fortify Software are looking to improve security in the development phase.

Gamma, based in Woodland Hills, Calif., offers a data obfuscation tool called InfoShuttle Data Security, to protect data in SAP development and test environments. The tool accesses the InfoShuttle Content Library, a repository of SAP objects and relationships, to automatically detect all related fields deep in SAP’s data structures for identifying and masking confidential data. In addition, it disguises data according to different rules, such as shuffling existing key fields and replacing data with unique generated numbers while maintaining consistency across multiple data tables, Gamma officials said. “The development environment by its very nature is an open one with access granted to a wide range of in-house staff and often to outside contractors,” said Suzanne Swanson, executive vice president of Gamma. “Enterprises really have to segment them off from the main network as a minimum, and make sure only strongly authenticated remote access is supported.

Security researchers at Fortify Software reported in their Oct. 9 white paper, “Attacking the Build through Cross-Build Injection,” a class of security vulnerabilities they are calling cross-build injection.

While external dependencies and open-source components do not necessarily represent an unacceptable security risk, Fortify’s researchers demonstrate that they deserve proper vetting to ensure they do not compromise the security of applications that make use of them.

“When software that depends on external components is built, an attacker may either target the server that hosts the open-source component or the DNS server that the build system uses to resolve the name of the remote server,” Jacob West, security research group manager at Fortify, said in an interview with eWEEK.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2194543,00.asp

“They’re totally ignoring it,” says IT consultant Joel Snyder. “When you go to your Web site design team, what you’re looking for is people who are creative and able to build these interesting Web sites… That’s No. 1, and No. 9 on the list would be that it’s a secure Web site.”

The biggest problem is designers aren’t building walls within Web applications to partition and validate data moving between parts of the system, he says. Security is usually something that’s considered after a site is built rather than before it is designed, agrees Khalid Kark, senior analyst at Forrester. “I’d say the majority of Web sites are hackable,” Kark says. “The crux of the problem is security isn’t thought of at the time of creating the application.”

That’s a big problem, and it’s one the nonprofit Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is trying to solve. An OWASP report called “The Ten Most Critical Web Application Security Vulnerabilities” was issued this year to raise awareness about the biggest security challenges facing Web developers. The first version of the list was released in 2004, but OWASP Chairman Jeff Williams says Web security has barely improved. New technologies such as AJAX and Rich Internet Applications that make Web sites look better also create more attack surfaces, he says.

Convincing businesses their Web sites are insecure is no easy task, though. “It’s frustrating to me, because these flaws are so easy to find and so easy to exploit,” says Williams, who is also CEO and co-founder of Aspect Security. “It’s like missing a wall on a house.”

Here is a summary of OWASP’s top 10 Web vulnerabilities, including a description of each problem, real-world examples and how to fix the flaws.

1. Cross site scripting (XSS)
2. Injection flaws
3. Malicious file execution
4. Insecure direct object reference
5. Cross site request forgery
6. Information leakage and improper error handling
7. Broken authentication and session management
8. Insecure cryptographic storage
9. Insecure communications
10. Failure to restrict URL access

http://www.computerworld.com.ph/?_s=4&_ss=P&P=3&PN=5398&L=H&II=299&ID=H,299,BYB,-1

Remember the OpenPGP and S/MIME email encryption wars? Back then, it was all about which encryption protocol would become the standard for protecting email messages from prying eyes. The headache and complexity of using encryption keys for messaging wasn’t appealing to the typical organization or end user. “The way a traditional PKI works, it’s useless to make the majority of information workers send and receive email” with it, says Richi Jennings, an analyst with Ferris Research.

But email encryption technology is actually getting easier to deploy and manage today, with new approaches such as identity-based encryption (IBE) from companies like Voltage Security and Identum that match users to their more tangible email addresses or logons.

So far, email encryption is still mainly used by organizations with highly sensitive missions or information, or paranoid security types who know too much. But enterprises, especially those under the heaviest regulatory microscopes like healthcare and financial services, are starting to look more closely at email encryption.

Aside from Voltage Security’s SecureMail, which uses a special algorithm that turns a user’s logon or email address into a public/private key pair, email encryption pioneer PGP yesterday rolled out a new feature for its PGP Universal Gateway product that lets you send encrypted mail to an organization or recipient that doesn’t have secure messaging. “It’s [email encryption] becoming more usable,” says Christopher Gervais, enterprise architect for Partners HealthCare System, a Boston-based network of hospitals and research labs, who says email encryption may be an option for the company in the near future.

“Some of the email encryption experience for end users has become more integrated — there’s no more goofy manual certificate management, or [having to decide] do I encrypt this or that. Integro Insurance, for instance, runs Voltage’s appliance for internal email among its 13 locations worldwide, and then with a Web-based setup for external messaging. “Encryption has to be painless or people are not going to do it,” says Fred Danback, principal and head of global technology services for Integro Insurance Brokers. “The [win] was largely due to the security of our infrastructure and our ability to send and receive encrypted messages.” “That’s not what encryption maestros call desktop-to-desktop, but it means certain email is not going unencrypted over the public Internet.”

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=133830&WT.svl=news1_4