01.18.09
Microsoft Botnets: The Chaos Continues
Fear not the Windows zombies
There are many ways to “Suck at Information Security”, but one easy way is to choose a platform that leads to entire military bases getting cracked.
The British military is one of the very few which choose this tactless route even for nuclear submarines and it costs it dearly.
Virus ‘sends RAF e-mails to Russia’
THE Ministry of Defence is investigating a major breach in security amid claims that all e-mail traffic from a number of RAF stations has been sent to a Russian internet server.
The e-mails were allegedly diverted to the Russian sender by a worm virus that entered the MoD systems 12 days ago bringing down computers and blocking e-mail communications across the military.
The world is already filled with about 320 million Windows PCs that are zombies, so what’s another massive botnet anyway?
New Botnets Replace Vanquished Pests
Although the shutdown of a California Web hosting company eradicated several prominent botnets last year, others have stepped up to fill the gaps, a security researcher says.
Gone from the landscape, said Joe Stewart, director of research at Atlanta-based SecureWorks Inc., are “Srizbi” and “Storm,” the botnets Stewart ranked as No. 1 and No. 5, respectively, in an April 2008 botnet census.
How can anyone combat Windows worms that appear all the time in new forms?
A variant of a malicious worm that targeted Microsoft Windows now is spreading via USB sticks, researchers say.
Security company BitDefender Labs, based in Bucharest, Romania, detected the Windows worm variant in late December. The original worm known as Win32.Worm.Downadup, first made its appearance in late November, exploiting a Microsoft vulnerability in the Windows RPC Server Service. Since then, it has rapidly spread across numerous corporate networks with the aim of distributing malicious software on susceptible computers.
Even an Instant Messaging (IM) program is no longer safe because Microsoft turned simple communication protocols into something that can invoke unknown executables.
Internet MSN users are warned. Some programme writers are now using IM to spread malicious programs such as viruses and worms. These viruses can spread when a person opens an infected file, such as pictures of pornographic nature, that is sent through IM by someone who appears to be a contact.
Why is a program for exchange of text leading to the running of untrusted code? This is an architectural deficiency that would prove costly. Outlook and ActiveX are almost perfect examples and they requires no social engineering to lead to a raft of menaces. █
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive
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Needs Sunlight said,
January 19, 2009 at 9:15 am
The recurrence of MSN worms ought to be a warning that it’s past time to switch IM protocols and networks, for those still in the stoneage.
MSN, live.com, and any other worm site ought to be blocked at the firewall. Same for ports used by MS Messenger.
XMPP and Jabber are the next-generation chat/messenging protocols. Use them or lose out.
The Mad Hatter said,
January 19, 2009 at 9:09 pm
And of course whenever a worm/virus/security hole is mentioned in the news, they never mention that it’s a Microsoft only problem, and if you point this out to the news media, they don’t take any action. The fact that Microsoft is often one of their major advertisers has nothing to do with this of course.
Roy Schestowitz said,
January 19, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Here’s an E-mail that I received this morning (for sharing):
Hi, Roy,
Here’s an example of pro-MSFT spin on headlines. All it takes is one
bad member on the editorial team and an entire publication can be
compromised, like here:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/01/16/virus.downadup/index.html?eref=rss_tech” title=”Downadup virus exposes millions of PCs to hijack
The title is “Downadup virus exposes millions of PCs to hijack”. If we
stick with the standard usage of the verb “expose” then the correct
title is “Windows exposes millions of PCs to hijack”
Had it been a Linux worm, there would probably be a different headline, no? The mythology of Microsoft is that “all computers” are not secure and “Windows is the standard”.