Yet Another Windows Worm

kraksmoka writes "MSNBC is reporting that yet another active worm is taking over computers in 115 countries today. 'Antivirus companies were on high alert Thursday after the rapid spread of a new computer worm that includes particularly malicious snooping techniques. Bugbear.B, a variant of a worm released last year, installs keylogging software, back-door software, and in some cases even attempts to control infected computersâ(TM) modems. Some of the wormâ(TM)s functions are designed to specially target financial institutions.' Yummy!"

Alreay run into this...

I've already run into this with one of our banking customers... now if they'd only bought the firewall solution from us that stripped email attatchments based on mime type and/or file extension (why the hell any half-way reasonable person would double-click on a .pif file in their email is beyond me). If I'd only known 10 years ago (before I was legally an adult) the kind of security that existed at some of the small to medium sized banks, I probably I've already run into this with one of our banking customers... now if they'd only bought the firewall solution from us that stripped email attatchments based on mime type and/or file extension. If I'd only known 10 years ago (before I was legally an adult) the kind of security that existed at some of the small to medium sized banks, I probably would have made some very different career choices--I suppose it's better this way... (Posted anonymously for obvious reasons)

Re:Alreay run into this...

Only if you are 2 years behind in your patches.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bullet in /MS01-020.asp

Re:Alreay run into this...

there are plenty of people out there who are using windows 98 on a modem.
Over the last 2 years they have allowed windows update to drip the updates to them.
Last week Joe's hard drive crashed and he reinstalled.

I cant see him sitting there for the next 8 hours downloading patches - sure, he will run windows update if we are lucky, but he's likely to be getting his other more important (to him) stuff setup to be worrying about critical updates.
Waiting for a mail about college?
Waiting for his girlfriend to get back to him?

Whatever it is, his thoughts at best would be "I'll just quickly check my mails..........."

I dont think its entirely stupidity, its human nature.

Re:Alreay run into this...

Waiting for his girlfriend to get back to him?

This is why Linux users are less suceptible to worms...

Re:Alreay run into this...

And crabs.

Re:Alreay run into this...

Here's [zdnet.com] an article on disabling windows script hosting.

Pretty simple really; for Windows 2000:

* Open "My Computer"

* Select "Tools/Folder Options"
* Click on File Types tab
* Find VBScript Script File
* Select Delete
* Click OK

For other versions of Windows, click on the link (it has instructions for 95, 98, NT and 2K; I'd imagine XP is similar to 2K but it was written in 2001 prior to XP's existence).

I'm trying to find instructions for modifying the security in Outlook 2000 as well, so it doesn't do anything automatically without a) my approval at the very least, or b) me asking it to run an attachment.

If anyone has pointers/links to articles on Outlook security, please post. Thanks!

Good sources instead of product placement

I realize the editors are obligated to plug MS, including MSNBC, in any way, shape, or form that they can, but that only lends them credibility. Most of the articles are edited from wire feeds like Reuters, API, UP, AFP (usch), BBC, and so on. Please use those.

In this case, other sites that covered this week's pair of Microsoft worms first -- and they'll cover next week's first, and so on. ZDNet, eWeek, Infoworld, Reuters, the Register and others covered it first. ZDNet has the bad habit however of sliding stories that reflect badly on MS quickly off the top pages and into obscurity.

Worms like sobig [zdnet.co.uk] and bugbear [zdnet.co.uk] only affect products with design flaws. Brian Valentine, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, said it best:

Our products just aren't engineered for security.

In short, there's nothing you can do to improve your security except upgrade to a different client: Mozilla [mozilla.org] or Opera [opera.com] instead of MSIE, Eudora [eudora.com] or others instead of OutLook, OpenOffice.org [openoffice.org] or WordPerfect instead of MS-Office. Usually by upgrading you get better functionality, ease of use in addition to stability.

Re:Alreay run into this...

This is an EXE, not a VBScript.

That's OK. Just go into the registry and delete this branch:

My Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe

Reboot, and I guarantee that computer won't have a problem with rogue .exe files again.

Re:Changing e-mail clients won't do anything.

How is this insightful? Last I checked Mozilla's mail client (and many others) don't have any kind of scripting enabled by default. You have to click attachments to get them to do anything, and by default it asks you to Save rather than open. So even if someone clicks on it and then Clicks OK, they just saved it somewhere.

Even cookies are off by default in the mail client. And you can turn off images.

So yeah I suppose people could "try" and target mozilla but I honestly don't think there is a whole lot of damage they could be allowed to do. The stuff that could potentially cause harm is off by default and the and people smart enough to turn it on are smart enough not to execute worms and viruses!

Re:LookOut, end users, and mad cash.

It's always so entertaining to me when one of these things starts spreading around. I use a text-only email client (mutt) on a linux system. True, I do have to explicitly save attachments to files and then go view them with the appropriate separate program, but that's actually a rare occurence. 99% of the time it's bare text anyways, and mutt is a really fast way to scan through them all -- no slogging around with a mouse. And I don't have to worry about looking at an email that might be spam either.

Of course, I know the majority of people will never want to do this. Which means I can maintain my air of smug superiority indefinitely. Ha!

Actachments

For every bug it strips out it will strip out a legitmite file as well.

That's bullshit. You'll notice these things don't just use any old extension, they use executable extensions. If you setup your mailserver to strip .pif, .scr, .vbs etc you'll be in a much better world.

When was the last time you got a legitimate email with a .pif attachment? Never, that's when. I setup this on all of my clients networks and have yet to have grabbed a single legit email.

Re:Actachments

Why is this modded as a troll? It's the truth.

I've been running a filter on email for about 5 years. Not ONCE has any of the email transmitted viruses / worms made it through, even to unpatched outlook and OE users.

See John Hardin's procmail filter [impsec.org] for a Very good example of how to do this.

If you are running a corporate meail server and are not filtering for known executable extensions, you are a fucking idiot. Period. There is just no excuse to EVER allow unfiltered mail through. Would you put your corporate LAN on the internet with no firewall at all? Of course not, but by not filtering email, you have a hole the size of Yankee Stadium in your protection. It's like wearing a condom with the end cut off.

The problem with anti-virus software is that it relies on the vendor to create and distribute filter definitions. It can take DAYS or WEEKS for vendors to identify a new virus, and create a definition, and for people to download the new rule set. This lag time is deadly. Antivirus software is a LAYER of security on email, but to rely on it alone is not enough.

Security is a process, and a mindset. Everyone who knows anything at all about software knows that every program has bugs. All you can do is minimize exposure, and you do that with many layers of security. These layers don't have to be intrusive, but you need them to reduce your vunerabilities.

Hey, if you want to bury your head in the sand and refuse to participate in security, that's fine with me. I charge by the hour.

Blah, blah...

The patch for this was out 2 years ago. No excuse.

The virus comes in as a .exe file. You should block that. No excuse.

AV dat files have been updated already. No excuse.

We've been filtering this all day.... It's not that hard to protect yourself.

Re:Blah, blah...

I don't know too much about this particular virus, but I have my doubts that it's contained in an exe : "In addition, it uses a particularly nasty flaw in Microsoftâ(TM)s Internet Explorer program and its implementation by Microsoftâ(TM)s Outlook e-mail reader that allows the virus to infect machines whenever a victim simply previews an e-mail message loaded with the program." Maybe I'm wrong, but an exe isn't executed when you just preview the email, but what do I know.

My question, Is Eudora safe?

The Outlook exploit...

...is one involving how it handles MIME types, especially within IFRAMEs. What happens is, the message headers will say it's one type, such as audio/x-midi, while the payload is really an EXE file, sometimes misidentified as a .bat or a .pif. The unpatched Outlook or OE thinks, "Ah, a MIDI file! Let's play it!" and blithely passes it to the OS, which thinks, "Ah, an executable! Let's run it!".

One more example of why HTML doesn't belong in email, aside from web bugs and other BS.

How to permanently disable HTML mail in Outlook XP

First, run Office Update so you have at least Outlook SP1 (SP2 has been out for a while, in fact). Next, add the following value to the registry:

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Office/10.0/Outlook/Opti on s/Mail

REG_DWORD: ReadAsPlain = 0x01

Outlook will convert all HTML to plain text before rendering it, and turn all embedded images, etc into attachments.

Thought I'd share that little tidbit.

Even simpler in Mozilla

In recent Mozilla versions, from the View menu while in Messenger, you can choose Message Body As/Plain Text. Works like a charm...

Re:How to permanently disable HTML mail in Outlook

add the following value to the registry:

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Office/10.0/Outlook/Opti on s/Mail

REG_DWORD: ReadAsPlain = 0x01

Outlook will convert all HTML to plain text before rendering it, and turn all embedded images, etc into attachments.


And people claim that Linux (UNIX, whatever) is hard to handle.

Re:Blah, blah...

The patch for this was out 2 years ago. No excuse.

Uh... Patch for what? I was unaware I could apply a "patch" that would prevent me from getting viruses. It exploits a user vulnerability (stupidity), not an OS one. And McAfee seems to disagree with you about when this was discovered. See here [nai.com]

Re:Blah, blah...

I'm sorry, you guys are all wrong. This exploits the relatively new (Well - from November of 2002 - not 2 years in any case) iframe vulnerability in IE [securityfocus.com].

Re:Blah, blah...

"Uh... Patch for what? I was unaware I could apply a "patch" that would prevent me from getting viruses."

Actually, there are a lot of patches for this problem... Mozilla, Evolution, Safari...

--Richard

Re:Blah, blah...

Patch for what? ... It exploits a user vulnerability (stupidity), not an OS one.

Patch, for the exploit in IE.

According to Symantec and McAfee, Bugbear.B uses an IE exploit that was fixed over 2 years ago : "Outgoing messages look to make use of the Incorrect MIME Header Can Cause IE to Execute E-mail Attachment vulnerability (MS01-020) [microsoft.com]".

Re:Blah, blah...

They should make a category for this, "Yet Another Windows Nasty", since they're not all worms [ahem].

Frustratingly typical day in the life of Microsoft

It's frustrating how many viruses Windows keeps getting slammed with.
There are some people that will point to a Linux worm or virus here
or there, but I run both Windows and Linux servers and there is
simply no comparison with the amount of worms Windows based machines
receive. Some people say it's because Windows is much more prevalent
than the Linux, but there are a lot of servers running Linux now.

The amount of work required to keep up with just doing updates has
finally gotten to me. Last night I noticed my Windows server was
sending packets like mad, suspicious I did a netstat -an, it was
making connections to hundreds of other machines. Tired of this
dance, I decided to just shut the windows server down. Maybe one day
I'll patch it...then again, maybe I'll just leave it shut down for
good.

Interestingly, my GNU\Debian Linux box is happily sitting right next
to it serving up pages. I haven't had to reboot it in ages, I imagine
it will be running until a nifty new kernel comes out that I just
have to have.

See ya Microsoft.

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

Yeah, because it's a lot of work to set windows to do updates automatically. Just a troll, nothing to see here.

You obviously don't administer servers with Enterprise Level Code. If you did, you'd know that with Microsoft you can't simply use automatic updates. Microsoft Service Packs break systems all the time. If you run ASP.NET and Sql Server code, you get bitch slapped everytime they release a service pack or "security fix". They consistently change functionality, without warning. Then they just post on their website (three months later) that the service pack changed the way some undocumented feature worked, but you weren't supposed to use it that way anyway, so tough shit.

Ha!! Automatic updates my ass.

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

Sorry but enterprise level and MS do not belong anywhere near each other despite what MS wants you to believe. I'm an MCSE and I can't imagine running critical services on the MS platform, user authentications, file sharing, and printing sure, but as an application platform windows server is just too bug ridden.

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

*tweet*

time out.

any admin who sets production servers to be "automatically updated" deserves to be terminated with prejudice.

you test all patches before deployment.

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

Give it time. As Linux permeates industry and business it will start getting more attention from the virus writers. It's all a matter of ROI. Right now, attacking windows has a very high ROI.

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

And if they didn't repell attacks, that would be almost good too.

Because there's nothing quite like a 100,000 machine-strong DDoS network of Redhat machines on cable modems. I hope you meant that if machines are not repelling attacks, then that would prompt bug fixes. However, as you see in the Windows world, most attacks are targetted at already-fixed issues. The machines that get infected are the ones that didn't stay up to date (or in lots of cases a few years ago, were running software they shouldn't be running, like personal Redhat machines running BIND because it was installed and started by default in an "install everything" scenario, the installation option used by most newbies because they're afraid of missing something during the initial install and not knowing how to install it later).

No, successful virus/worm/hax0r infections are never desired. Better for the issues to be found by competent and moral ("moral" being that they don't use the exploit maliciously) people before a major virus or worm is written. There are excellent patch distribution channels for both Windows and Linux these days. People really should use them. And for production servers that don't use them because they need to do validation before deploying the fix, they need to get off their asses and do the validation. There's no excuse for a 2 year old bug causing issues now. That's 1 year, 11 months, and 3 weeks of laziness (assuming it takes about a week to do a validation and deploy the fix and any resulting changes).

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

Yes, but as with any *NIX, the damage Joe Luser can cause is significantly curtailed to their own userspace. The virus would need to take advantage of a root-level vulnerability to infect an entire machine. Not so with most Windows default configs.

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

Here's a secret you might not know:

On Unix/Linux Desktop systems there is nothing on the system as important as the user's data in his home directory.

So the whole notion that trojans/worms etc. can't hurt the systems that 'mere users' will be using as there is more and more of a push to Linux desktop systems is just plain nonsense. If it wipes out an employee's whole writeable diskspace, it's done all the damage it could possibly do. Nobody cares that everything that rolled off the Install CD is still there and might even be pristine.

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

On Unix/Linux Desktop systems there is nothing on the system as important as the user's data in his home directory.

I don't know about you, but I administer systems with hundreds or thousands of users. It's *their* data I wish to protect, not that of the irresponsible schmoe who ran untrusted binary code.

<OBSIMOM>
But if they ask me nicely, maybe I'll keep that backup tape away from the degausser.
</OBSIMON>

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

Give it time. As Linux permeates industry and business it will start getting more attention from the virus writers. It's all a matter of ROI. Right now, attacking windows has a very high ROI.

Which is exactly why so many worms target Apache rather than IIS.

Batting down strawmen for 12 years and counting ...

old bullshit.

Ah, there's no troll like an old troll, "Free software does not get worms because no one uses it and no one hates it." As you phrased it,

Just wait until:
a.) Everybody decides to hate Linus.
b.) Linux machines can be counted in the millions.

a. is unlikely. How can anyone hate free software? Oh yeah, it's putting you out of business. Microsoft does an admirable job of astroturfing congressmen and Slashdot, but they have yet to put out a good free software worm. The intersection of people with the skill to write free software worms and the number of people who hate free software is vanishinly small. Competent people like free software, get used to it. Windoze on the other hand is just about universally hated and just as easy to break.

b. Linux machines can be counted in the millions. Desktop machines. If you figure 10% of US desktops are running some form of free software, you get millions of computers. The rest of the world has plenty of free computers as well. Yet I don't see anything breaking down mutt, pine, balsa or even Mozilla's email client. AOL's windowze messenger once had a problem but only on Microsoft platforms. GAIM and others had no peoblems at all.

To sum it all up for you, nothing is as bad as the Microsoft monoculture of poor quality software. Free software is more diverse, of better quality and is universally loved.

Re:old bullshit.

Yet I don't see anything breaking down mutt, pine, balsa or even Mozilla's email client.

Pine has had a number of problems with maliciously coded attachments. These were real-world exploits, not theoretical ones.

Linux isn't immune from viruses - email or otherwise - even though in practise it suffers less. The troll before you was telling a half-truth when he claimed that Linux is safer because (a) everybody loves Linux even though (b) nobody uses it. Those two factors are real and they do contribute; it's silly to deny it. However there are dozens of other factors, eg:

• Less integration between desktop apps means fewer unexpected side-effects. Expect this to change for the worse as KDE and GNOME add more features.
• Better designed server apps: I believe that in general Linux (and UNIX) have server apps that were designed with security in mind. Though there are always exceptions.
• Greater diversity in hardware and software platforms; makes it much harder to write a UNIX virus and it's much harder for a poorly written virus to spread.
• ...

Protecting Linux against viruses is one of those "eternal vigilance" things. Don't get smug because Linux is relatively free from problems today while Windows is copping a flogging. Yes, I think Microsoft brought most of it on themselves and yes, I think Linux (and UNIX) is more immune by design. However I think it's naive to think that things will stay like this forever. Linux viruses are on their way. Be ready to eat your words in 5 years time when Linux becomes more popular and Linux viruses become commonplace.

Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros

Yeah, just imagine if something like Apache gets popular [netcraft.com], imagine the havoc people could cause with uptimes [netcraft.com] on those OS's.

Yes, the server community is different from userland and every piece of software will have its flaws, but popularity is not proportional to the amount of worms and viruses, lack of quality is.

it's a good one!

This one spread through my university like wildfire today! It even seems to fake Norton virus definition updating, such that the computer appears to be updating it's virus definitions but isn't. It seemed to spread via hijacked messages that it attached itself to.

New M$ initiative

I never have a problem with these worms. I downloaded Windows Robin(TM) a long time ago!

Re:and again

A much better solution than b), is to completely remove Outlook. Especially if you're only using it as a mail reader.

Re:and again

And once again, those of us who know how to configure our windows systems and aren't stupid enough to (a) have open network shares with no passwords and (b) open random email attachments are safe. (emphasis mine)

Please read the fucking article. Not only is the email attachment not random, because it pretends to be a reply to an email that you've recently sent to an infected person (among other tricks), but it also doesn't have to be opened, because it uses an IE exploit to run itself as soon as it shows up in Outlook's preview window.

It's a fun one.

This virus has been hitting a bunch of people over here at Stanford since sometime yesterday. It takes random messages from your inbox and forwards them to random people in your contact list and spoofs the sender. I've recieved a lot of weird emails lately, but some of my neighbors have seen some pretty personal emails sent or recieved by their friends and acquaintences. People hitting on people, people asking their parents for money, rejection letters from companies... the whole works. Our SMTP server has been completely shut down to stop the spread!

Re:It's a fun one.

This is precisely the reason why I PGP digitally sign all my email. Almost a year ago, someone on a mailing list for one of my University groups got a virus on their computer sending out spoofed email and/or virus. One of them happened to have my name (email address only) on it. I was lucky to not lose any face from it, but it was very unsettling for me. Now I can say if it doesn't have a signature, it aint mine

Tell me about it.

This sucker ripped through our campus like nothing. Heuristics missed it, and the definitions weren't updated until a few hours after a few hundred machines got nailed.

the annoying part is that as complex as you can make software, you can't fix the people who are morons, which is where the real problem lies.

oh well.

Re:and that will work how?

do the users know that openme.doc.scr is more likely to be a virus than flowerbox.scr?

Which is why all .pif, .scr, .exe files are blocked at the email server, in or out. And why anything with double-barreled extensions (.doc.pdf) are also killed, or anything with heaps of whitespace in the name. The message is in place of the attachment.

Strangely, our business can continue to operate without problems or delays even if the staff can't email screensavers to their friends.

Poor Windows....

It's time to face the facts: Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.

How to Fix MS Software

... and in some cases even attempts to control infected computersâ(TM) modems.

Seems to me that would be the way to get these things fixed permanantly. Make a worm that would call MS tech support on peoples modems. Or any other MS 800 number. Untill something costs them a LOT of money, these will continue to show up.

Modem..

Can anyone tell me why it bothers to try connecting to the internet so hard?

The article says that an infected machine will try to get on to the internet, and will try dialing the modem if it has to.

Surely the most interesting machines are those with fast good connections - not people on crappy slow modems...

This is from the assumption that the computers would be used for a DDoS.
Has a worm ever been used for anything other than a DDoS?

Re:Modem..

Bzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing.

This worm does try hard to get on the 'net. Copied from Symantec [symantec.com].

If W32.Bugbear.B determines that the default e-mail address for the local system belongs to a banking company, it enables auto-dialing through the registry.
This is accomplished by setting the following value:

"EnableAutodial"="0000001"

in the registry key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Internet Settings

The worm contains a large list (over one thousand) of targeted bank domain names from around the world. This is likely in an attempt to steal passwords more effectively. Therefore, banking institutions may be considered to be more at at risk.

Looks like they're trying to obtain passwords to bank specific systems.

For some value of "interesting," maybe

The article says that an infected machine will try to get on to the internet, and will try dialing the modem if it has to. Surely the most interesting machines are those with fast good connections - not people on crappy slow modems...

No, the most interesting machines are those which aren't connected to the public network at all. The servers at your bank which track your balance, those mysterious "power grid" servers that HomeSec keeps spreading cyberterror FUD about, military computers with Top Secret documents, etc.

These machines are unlikely to be interfaced with a public net at all, especially not sitting on a fat pipe; but many of them have to network _somehow_. Regular modems, ISDN, etc. aren't quite dead yet.

Patch Available

Quick, get your patch here [redhat.com]

Re:Patch Available

"Quick, get your patch here [redhat.com]"

Crap. It broke my machine. I can't play GTA anymore!

Re:Patch Available

Crap. It broke my machine. I can't play GTA anymore!

Sure you can [transgaming.com].

Conflict of intrest...

You know, we should get our information from a reputable and IT source like symantec [symantec.com] who provides details on how to remove it rather than a news source owned by the people who make windows, the vulnerable software.

Re:Conflict of intrest...

Well Symantec is not above Conflict of Interest.

They consistently overplay the danger of computer infections, as the more scared people are the more biz they will make.

Look at their adds and see what scare tactics they use.

Commercial Idea

I am surprised Red Hat or some other company doesn't take advantage of heavy Windows worm activity.

"Did you get hit by that new worm?"

"No, I run Linux."

Re:Commercial Idea

"Did you get hit by that new worm?"

"No, I run Linux."

"Do you read PC Gamer?"

"No, I run Linux."

Re:Commercial Idea

"Do you have a sex life?"

"No, I run Linux."

Once you've gone hack, you'll never go back

What do you mean? Linux is my sex life!

Re:Commercial Idea

Close. I believe the quote actually goes...

"Do you have a sex life?"

"No, I read PC Gamer."

Re:Commercial Idea

"Do you read PC Gamer?"

"No, I run Linux."

Y'know, the money you save by not buying Windows and Office will more than pay for your 2 game consoles of choice. Or, if your two consoles of choice are out of stock, you could just get an X-box.

Re:This went through my workplace like wildfire to

One interesting thing is it opens port 1080, which is normally used by MSN messenger

Sounds like you're using a Socks server to connect to MSN - 1080 is the default Socks proxy port, not MSN messenger.

SOCK server (or Bugbear.B ) on port 1080

OK, maybe you're right, but according to symantec [symantec.com]:

Backdoor routine
The worm also opens a listening port on port 1080. A hacker can connect to this port and perform the following actions:

• Delete files.
• Terminate processes.
• List processes and deliver the list to the hacker.
• Copy files.
• Start processes.
• List files and deliver the list to the hacker.
• Deliver intercepted keystrokes to the hacker in an encrypted form. This action could release confidential information typed on a computer (passwords, login details, and so on).
• Deliver the system information to the worm's creator in the following form:
  • User: <user name>
  • Processor: <type of processor used>
  • Windows version: <Windows version, build number>
  • Memory information: <Memory available, and so on>
  • Local drives, their types (for example, fixed/removable/RAM disk/CD-ROM/remote), as well as their physical characteristics.
• List the network resources and their types, and deliver the list to the worm's creator.

It's a nasty one

This hit MIT starting this morning. It's quite clever about where it gets the addresses and e-mails from. It knows how to scan the mailbox formats of many common e-mail clients, not just Outlook. It sends itself as an attachment to actual messages from the infected user's inbox. So the body is not something obvious ("I send you this file to have your advice"). I actually thought several of the messages I received were real, since they pertained to recent business around campus. (I didn't open the attachments, of course seeing the .scr extension - not that it does much to an OS X box). It's backdoor runs on a fairly standard port (1080) that's used for plenty of legitimate apps (proxy servers) so scanning your network for open ports won't necessarily find it for you. (as opposed to scanning and seeing that port 31337 is open, or something like that, which obviously "wrong"). The keylogger component is quite scary too. It's one of the more advanced viruses I've seen recently...

On a related note, anti-virus programs is one place where I can actually see a potential useful application of "trusted computing" (no, not necessarily Palladium). If there could be some way to to tell the OS "Look, I don't care if you're the administrator or not: the only programs that are allowed to terminate the anti-virus scanner process are the scanner itself, and, say, Task Manager". By using keys to prove their identity, it _might_ make it a lot harder for virii to terminate anti-virus programs. (Note to slashbots: I'm not saying Palladium is good because it will do this (I don't even know if it does). I'm saying this is one potential application of some as-yet-undeveloped implemenation of "trusted computing".

Re:It's a nasty one

Your proposal is doable on any standard hardware that offers memory protection, no cryptographic keys needed.

If a program was able to tell the OS that it could be shut down by programs signed by keys A, B, and C, that would suffice. You modify the PE or Elf format to include signatures. Mandatory Acess Controls can also prevent one program run by user D from killing another program run by user D.

Making users non-administrators and running virus checkers as seperate users would also prevent some potential problems. Mail clients could use IPC to pass emails to the virus checkers and get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

Now, as far as Palladium goes, I think there's a pretty simple alternative.

Really what I'd like to see is L4 or another nanokernel and a few low-level drivers in the frimware along with a Forth interpreter for OpenFirmware. Your firmware would be a viable but minimalist OS, where before booting you could edit the fingerprintsof PKs allowed to sign kernels. Booting would simply be playing two-kernel-monte with the firmware kernel and a signed kernel off the HD. 1 MB and 2 MB EEPROMs are cheap enough that putting a viable OS in the firmware is looking quite attractive. Imagine having a rescue floppy built into your mobo. The QNX demo floppy shows you can do a hell of a lot in 1,440 KB.

My SGI Indy firmware loads the Linux kernel directly off the HD and directly executes it. The firmware doesn't have a fully functional kernel like LinuxBIOS, but it suffices for a bootloader in firmware. It would be easy to add signature checking to the process, along with a small menu for entering/deleting PK fingerprints. If you ship with the fingerprints from the dozen most common OS vendors, 99.99% of people will not touch the settings or know they're even there, but you still get all of the integrity guarantees of Palladium. You would of course make NVRAM locked out at a hardware level durring the boot process, wich could only be undone by triggering a POST. This solution requires no new harware besides the NVRAM lockout, and the NVRAM lockout really isn't that important if you can assume the OS will prevent writing to NVRAM. The NVRAM lockout could be skipped in the first generation for the sake of easing adoption.

Like I said earlier, my SGI firmware already does most of what's needed, as does LinuxBIOS. Apple and Sun firmware is already quite advanced and I don't imagine adding the required functionality would be that hard. Really the only advantage Palladium adds over current hardware with a BIOS upgrade is DRM. Palldium also carries a lot of baggage. I would love to see AMD come out with an improved x86-64 BIOS that includes most of the bootloader along with signature checking, if not a full nanokernel OS in firmware. Hardware NVRAM locking would also be nice.

Fools!

Any readers in the UK with Sky Digital, switch to channel 268.

Overnight, the channel plays a Flash-based word game, where viewers SMS in answers. It's running on a Windows PC, and the screen currently being broadcast to 7 million homes is....

McAfee dialog box: 'bugbear.b High Virus Advisory....'

Hmmm.

(wandering OT - the channel, 'Friendly TV' is apparently being run by students on work experience. A nightly live-broadcast show is 'Girl Talk', where... girls... talk... about... things. Whatever comes into their heads. Oh, and they get progressively more drunk as the evening progresses, which no doubt helps.)

ugh

Am I the only person who's tired of hearing about the latest way for idiots to screw up their computer and infect dozens of other computers used by similarly idiotic people? I mean, come on... Haven't there been patches and security measures around for years that prevent viruses like this one from infecting your PC?

I guess it is helpful for admins to see virus warnings on slashdot though.

this is why..

you know..

for the longest time, i've been attempting to defend windows ever since 2k stopped being the 'absolute junk' syndrome. i read about this earlier in the day, and started ranting in irc.

well, since it's easier to bitch than act, i decided to act. i went directly to the local apple store and bought an ibook.

i have -never- been happier. this is literally the best of breed machine i have ever used. all the benefits of unix without the hassle of windows.

so, this is totally offtopic, but as a govt. employee who deals with this sort of thing every day, my old home pc is now strictly a local lan CF/oracle development box, and every damn machine i buy from now on will be apple.

And again....

If your ocmpany got hit go ask your network admin why they aren't blocking ANY executable email attachment. Then go ask their boss.

IT'S NOT HARD PEOPLE.

Educate the user

The people that open these attachments aren't system admins. They aren't network programmers. They aren't even computer literate half the time. Most of the time they treat the computer like a magical device that mysteriously allows them to type and send mail very fast. My mom doesn't even know what a zip/exe/jpg file is. I think it is hard for us to imagine not knowing what we know about computers, but the fact is, that most people using computers don't know a fraction as much as anyone reading slashdot. In fact, most of these "virus" are technically trojans. They are all exploiting the ignorance of the user to mass infect others. There is nothing any operating system can do to stop this. If we were all running Linux, more people would be tricked into running as a SuperUser or Root or some other exploit virus programmers would find. In the end, it's not which is it the right operating system, but have we educated the person behind the machine.

JDBGMGR!!!!!

I knew that damn little teddy bear icon in my windows directory was up to no good!!!!!

Come on people, patch your OS's

You can fix the OS, but you can't fix the users. People who get hit by this have nobody to blame but themselves (or their Windows administrator).

Microsoft fixed this vulnerability more then 2 years ago. Why do people not update their software?

According to Symantec [symantec.com], Bugbear.B "uses the Incorrect MIME Header Can Cause IE to Execute E-mail Attachment [microsoft.com] vulnerability".

Just in time...

... to reply to mi2g claims that Linux is more hacked than Windows [vnunet.com]. Now you have hundreds of windows computers in your near vicinity waiting to be hacked thru port 1080. I think that at the rate of infection of this last worm, in very few days (sunday?) will be the most widely distributed computer worm ever.

The Fun Of Reading Other People's E-Mail

Our University is being hit hard, especially because almost all classes and departments have these massive listservs and the listserv software is so archaic that it doesn't have viral replication blocking. Oh well, at least I get the personal enjoyment of reading other people's e-mails that get cloned. So far I've got 2 that involve people talking about me behind my back. There's always a golden lining people.

This is amazing

The entire physics department here got an email with the subject line "Re: hep-lat 020711 daily received" with the pif attachement.

hep-lat is the Los Alamos eprint Archive [lanl.gov] subject code for high energy physics on lattice models. The email refers to a paper on "A new proposal for the fermion doubling problem" which is supposedly attached (instead you get the .pif file)

The subject line is matched amazingly well to the recipient list. I thought "that looks interesting, I might have a look even though I probably wasn't supposed to get it."

An Idea?

handy little solution that has been around for a while.. (jpeg image file) [evileon.com]

BugBear then goes searching for a modem

I disagreed with one point the article made.

BugBear then goes searching for a modem, enables it, then tries to get the computer to dial out, probably to reach the virus author. âoeHe really wanted to get into those machines,â Kuo said. U.S. financial institutions probably arenâ(TM)t at risk from this technique, Kuo said, because most donâ(TM)t have modems attached to their critical computers any more.

Today I was at fry's electronics, and I saw a Quickbooks POS (point of sale, not peice of shit) system on display for small to medium business. This started getting me thinking back to my earlier days of consulting.

One of the companies I did work for had a retail chain of mall stores. At night the registers would dump their management reports to our AS/400 machine and someone would make neat reports out of them. It wasn't a huge amount of data, so each store would just phone home on those really nice $300 courier modems.

Most of our store managers kept in touch with us via outlook/exchange server.

Now another interesting side note is veriphone uses POTS lines for nearly %100 of their credit card processing. Tons of small stores have networks in them now, managers reading e-mail and such.

So which of these financial institutions has its shit so well together that they don't need modems? I just wanted to point out the author of the article is a stupidhead. Boo!

Re:windows vs *nix - un-informed is un-informed

that's not really true though, since there are holes in windows that have been there since windows version 1. Sure there are holes in any program, but at least most of the unix/linux/macos viruses don't cause the computer to crash. In almost every case, unix/linux/bsd viruses are really just exploiting a single program.

The point being...? Really, you have done nothing to assist our underinformed cyrax777. Let me help, please.

First, causing the box to crash or not is irrelevant, as is what program allowed the compromise - a compromised machine is no longer yours. Time to re-install the whole machine.

The reason *nix is much harder to infect in the first place is users run with user privileges, as do all the child processes that they create. Thus, the e-mail client cannot over-write any system files since it lacks the autority to do so. This is where "rooting" the box comes from - you need to elevate your normal privs to super user status in order to do any real damage. You can tell most *nixes that "This user account can never elevate it's priveleges", and it likely never will. System services, like say the Apache HTTP server, are usually set up to run as under-priveleged users as well, so compromising them leads to even more difficulty controlling the whole machine - there's very few opennings in the *nix security armour. In contrast, right now my XP laptop is running login.scr as SYSTEM. Yup, a screen saver with system level privs. IIS on NT/Win2K is the same way - out of the box it runs under the SYSTEM account. If one of these is compromised, it's not your machine anymore. Now you know where a lot of the issues with Windows security lie.

This reflects one of the design philosophies of *nix: only give users the privileges they need, and have a huge, well defined wall between them and the system. Windows seems to come from the other end - give it all, and try to take away what's dangerous. IMHO, that's where Windows fails - miserably.

Soko

Re:windows vs *nix - un-informed is un-informed

In contrast, right now my XP laptop is running login.scr as SYSTEM. Yup, a screen saver with system level privs.

What's your point? The login screen saver logs users in, so it makes sense that it has some sort of advanced privileges. (Maybe it doesn't need all of SYSTEM, true...)

And the screen saver is well protected in winnt, believe it or not. It runs in a separate secure desktop, just like the ctrl-alt-del desktop does.

Now I agree that the security architecture of windows has flaws, but c'mon, there's got to be a better example than login.scr...

Re:windows vs *nix

The main reason why *nix boxes don't have anywhere near the number of virii infect them is because the average *nix user has had to set the box up themselves and had to go through the learning curve that is involved in that. Anyone who has got enough knowledge to set up a *nix box (and in reality most people that accually are able to install windows) have enough general computer sence to not catch virii. I personally hate virus scanners as they just take up my resources. Periotic scans let me know that I am not just overconfident that I am invoulnerable, but infact paying enough attention to what I do on a regular basis to delete the emails with attachments like 'happy99.exe' even though I don't in truth _know_ that it is in fact a virus. *nix isn't really a safer OS from virii, it just has a better trained user base.

Re:Ya know

The fact that the large majority of webservers out there are running Apache (many on linux) and have been for a long time suggests otherwise. Sure bugs exist and there will always be exploits for all platforms, but somehow the Apache team is dodging those problems far better than Microsoft. With even MS themselves admitting that their emphasis was never on security in the past, you're probably one of the few people left in the world trying to defend their record.

So don't complain too much about the zealots around here -- you're just as much one as the rest of them, and one of the more vehement that I've seen.