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Interview with a DDoS troll: Meet ‘the Gods of the Internet’

DDoS attacks are a way to keep corrupt corporations honest, according to an anonymous member of DerpTrolling, who gives us an inside look at the self-proclaimed gods of the Internet. The man behind the curtain One of the first things he says is that he absolutely cannot offer proof. This makes a disappointing amount of sense: he is a self-confessed DDoS troll, a member of the infamous group DerpTrolling. Since distributed denial-of-service attacks could be considered a federal crime under US law — and, indeed, are an offence in many locations around the globe, including the UK and Australia — he, understandably, won’t give a name, location or even rough age. As a corollary, we have no way of knowing that he is who he says he is. We’ll call him Incognito. To talk to him, we plug into a private chat session from opposite sides of the globe (as indicated by time zones) using an encrypted Chrome add-on. “I’ve seen Anonymous at its best,” he tells us. “I participated in their major DDoS attacks against Visa and PayPal, although the role DerpTrolling played in those attacks is pretty much unknown. I’ve seen the rise and fall of LulzSec. So let’s just say I am old enough to know how to stay hidden.” One thing is clear from the outset: Incognito believes that what DerpTrolling does is for the good of everyone. “DerpTrolling as a group shows the world, particularly the gaming community, how big companies and corporations such as Riot or Blizzard only care about money,” he explains. “Our methods are forcing big companies and corporations to upgrade their servers and make sure their clients are their top priority.” DerpTrolling has been around since around 2011 or so, and Incognito has been a member since the beginning. Its method of attack, as mentioned above, is DDoS — overloading servers with external communication requests, rendering the target systems unusable for a period of time. DerpTrolling has attacked several high-profile servers over the years, including those of League of Legends, World of Tanks, EVE Online, DoTA 2, Blizzard, RuneScape and, more recently, Xbox Live and the Nintendo Web store. Although their actions may appear inscrutably juvenile and unwarranted — done for, as the saying goes, the lulz — the team identifies rather strongly with Richard Stallman’s assessment of DDoS as a form of protest against what it perceives as a callous disregard for gamers on the part of games publishers. “A company that doesn’t care only for money would make the effort, which includes time and money, to make sure their servers aren’t able to be crippled by a simple DDoS attack,” Incognito said. “We decided to take action because, if we had the capability to stop corporate greed and we did nothing, that in itself is a crime. We thought DDoS attacks were appropriate because they do not affect customers in a monetary way, unlike leaking data — although we are not opposed to leaking data.” Lines in the sand He is careful to point out that DerpTrolling is against doxxing — that is, the leaking of information about a specific individual, such as address, phone number, Social Security number, credit card and bank account details — and swatting, a term for calling the police to the home of said doxxed individual for spurious reasons. In one of the most famous incidents involving the group, though, one particular individual was doxxed and swatted — Twitch streamer PhantomL0rd. While DerpTrolling was attacking Battle.net, EA.com, Club Penguin and Riot, it was allegedly because those were games PhantomL0rd was playing. At some point during the DDoS activities, PhantomL0rd was doxxed on several gaming websites — and then someone called the police to his home, accusing the streamer of holding five people hostage. Incognito is cagey about the incident, and won’t comment on why the group targeted PhantomL0rd or what precisely DerpTrolling did do — only saying that there is no hard evidence connecting DerpTrolling to the actions. “Yes, Phantoml0rd was doxxed and swatted,” he said. “But we never threatened to harm him physically and we have never taken credit for that attack.” “We decided to take action because, if we had the capability to stop corporate greed and we did nothing, that in itself is a crime.” Incognito He seems determined to impress that there are lines DerpTrolling won’t cross — that what the group does, it does for the good of all. As an example, he mentions that the group is sitting on what could have been a significant customer data leak. “We are currently in possession of over 800,000 usernames and passwords from the 2K gaming studio. As of right now, our members as a whole have decided that leaking data is not what we do, and therefore we will not leak such damaging data,” he said, adding that he had contacted 2K to inform the publisher of the vulnerability in its system — and received no response. “I personally contacted them over a month ago. I did not send them an anonymous letter, I made sure they understood exactly who I was. And offered plenty of proof.” Unless the data is actually leaked, he believes that gaming companies are unlikely to spend the money to issue a fix. CNET has contacted 2K for comment and will update when we receive a reply. Incognito also goes out of his way to dissociate DerpTrolling’s activities from those of LizardSquad, the group that claimed responsibility for calling a bomb threat on a plane carrying Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley. “I want to make it absolutely clear that DerpTrolling is in no way affiliated with LizardSquad,” he said. Although LizardSquad had requested that the two groups work together, DerpTrolling had refused, he said. “LizardSquad is a run by an extremist hacker who has close ties to UGNazi. You could say that the ISISGang is the elite ‘leaders’ of LizardSquad. We have no wish to associate with any individual or group that has ties with such extremists.” ISISGang has been accused of making prank calls that see their targets swatted and posing as Middle Eastern terrorists, while UGNazi is allegedly responsible for several doxxings and data leaks. Incognito seems quite firm that DerpTrolling wishes to commit no actual harm. The end and the means DerpTrolling has more up its sleeve. Attacks on Xbox Live and the Nintendo Web store on Saturday, September 28 were “test fire” for “upcoming attacks”, Incognito says — although he won’t go into any further detail about that. Nor is it easy to guess who the targets might be. DerpTrolling allows the community to select targets much of the time, Incognito said, via text or tweet. The fact that sometimes the attacks achieve a result justifies the work in his view; Incognito says that League of Legends and Xbox Live have both upgraded their servers in response to DerpTrolling DDoS attacks — in spite of negative public opinion. “Children do not know what is best for them. We are basically the Gods of the Internet, we know what is best for them.” Incognito “The public will always have an opinion that is based on what the media feeds them,” he says. “Children do not know what is best for them. We are basically the Gods of the Internet, we know what is best for them.” When asked if DDoS is a snake chasing its own tail — that is, if no one engaged in DDoS attacks, then companies would not have to dedicate resources to protecting against them — he once again pleads no comment. There is a condition under which DerpTrolling will cease operations: “If the presidents of Sony and Microsoft will wear a shoe on their heads, then DerpTrolling will disband and we will not attack any more servers.” As for Incognito himself, we suspect he might be around for a long time. When asked if he himself would ever hang up his hat, he seems baffled by the question. “Why would I want to stop?” Source: http://www.cnet.com/au/news/the-gods-of-the-internet/

DDoS Attacks Can Take Down Your Online Services Part 3: Defending Against DDoS Attacks

Various defense strategies can be invoked to defend against DDoS attacks. Many of these depend upon the intensity of the attack. We discuss some of these in this article. Mitigation Strategies Some protection from DDoS attacks can be provided by firewalls and intrusion-prevention systems (systems that monitor for malicious activity). When a DDoS attack begins, it is important to determine the method or methods that the attacker is using. The web site’s front-end networking devices and the server’s processing flow may be able to be reconfigured to stop the attack. UDP Attacks UDP (User Datagram Protocol) attacks send a mass of UDP requests to a victim system, which must respond to each request. One example is a ping attack. It is an enormous influx of ping requests from an attacker that requires the victim server to respond with ping responses. Another example of a UDP attack is when the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) must be used by the server to return error messages. The messages may indicate that a requested service is unavailable or that a host or router cannot be reached. An attacker may send UDP messages to random ports on the victim server, and the server must respond with a “port unreachable” ICMP message. Mitigation Strategy In the case of a UDP attack, the firewall could be configured to reject all UDP messages. True, this would prevent legitimate use of UDP messages, such as pings sent by monitoring services to measure the uptimes and response times of the web site. However, to be shown as failed by a monitoring service is much better than actually being down. SYN Attacks In a SYN attack, a mass of connection requests are sent to the victim server via SYN messages. Typically, the victim server will assign connection resources and will respond with SYN ACK messages. The server expects the requesting client to complete the connections with ACK messages. However, the attacker never completes the connections; and the server soon runs out of resources to handle further connection requests. Mitigation Strategy In this case, the server connection facility could be reconfigured so that it did not assign connection resources until it received the ACK from the client. This would slightly extend the time required to establish a connection but would protect the server from being overwhelmed by this sort of an attack. DNS Reflection Attack A DNS reflection attack allows an attacker to send a massive amount of malicious traffic to a victim server by generating a relatively small amount of traffic. DNS requests with a spoofed victim address are sent to multiple DNS systems to resolve a URL. The DNS servers respond to the victim system with DNS responses. What makes this sort of attack so efficient is that the DNS response is about 100 times as large as the DNS request. Therefore, the attacker only needs to generate 1% of the traffic that will be sent to the victim system. DNS reflection attacks depend upon DNS open resolvers that will accept requests from anywhere on the Internet. DNS open resolvers were supposed to have been removed from the Internet, but 27 million still remain. Mitigation Strategy A defense against DNS reflection attacks is to allow only DNS responses from the domain of the victim server to be passed to the server. Mitigation Services Given a sufficiently large DDoSattack, even the steps mentioned here may not protect a system. If nothing else, the attack can overwhelm the bandwidth of the victim’s connection to the Internet. In such cases, the next step is to use the services of a DDoS mitigation company with large data centers that can spread the attack volume over multiple data centers and can scrub the traffic to separate bad traffic from legitimate traffic. Prolexic, Tata Communications, AT&T, Verisign, CloudFare, and others are examples of DDoS mitigation providers. These services will also monitor the nature of the attack and will adjust their defenses to be effective in the face of an attacker that modifies its strategies as the attack progresses. Legality DDoS attacks are specifically outlawed by many countries. Violators in the U.K. can serve up to ten years in prison. The U.S. has similar penalties, as do most major countries. However, there are many countries from which DDoS attacks can be launched without penalty. With respect to the Spamhaus attack described in Part 1, the CEO of CyberBunker, a Dutch company, was arrested in Spain and was returned to the Netherlands for prosecution. Summary Companies must prepare for the likelihood of losing their public-facing web services and must make plans for how they will continue in operation if these services are taken down. This should be a major topic in their Business Continuity Plans. For instance, in the case of the bank attacks described in Part 1, many banks made plans to significantly increase their call center capabilities to handle customer services should their web sites be taken down by a DDoS attack. DDoS attacks are here to stay. They are motivated by too many factors – retaliation, political statements, aggressive competitors, ransom – and are fairly easy to launch. Botnets can be rented inexpensively. There are even sophisticated tools available on the darknet to launch significant attacks. The defenses against DDoS attacks are at best limited. The ultimate defense is to subscribe to a DDoS mitigation service that can be called upon when needed. Source: http://www.techproessentials.com/ddos-attacks-can-take-down-your-online-services-part-3-defending-against-ddos-attacks/

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DDoS Attacks Can Take Down Your Online Services Part 3: Defending Against DDoS Attacks

Hackers using Shellshock to spread Kaiten Mac OS DDoS malware

Hackers are exploiting the Shellshock bug to infect numerous systems, including Apple Mac OS X, with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) malware known as Kaiten. Security researchers from Trend Micro reported uncovering the campaign in a blog post, warning that it has the potential to inflict devastating DDoS attacks. “We found that one of the payloads of Bash vulnerabilities, which we detect as TROJ_BASHKAI.SM, downloaded the source code of Kaiten malware, which is used to carry out denial-of-service attacks,” read the post. “Kaiten is old IRC-controlled DDoS malware and, as such, there is a possibility that the attackers employed Shellshock to revive its old activities like DDoS attacks to target organisations.” Discovered earlier in September, Shellshock is a critical vulnerability in the Bash code used by Unix and Unix-like systems. Trend Micro listed the new attack’s ability to infect Mac OS systems as being particularly troubling, highlighting it as evidence that hackers are using Shellshock to expand the victim-base of their campaigns. “Typically, systems infected with Shellshock payloads become a part of their botnet, and therefore can be used to launch DDoS attacks. In addition, the emergence of a downloaded file that targets Mac OS clearly shows that attackers are broadening their target platform,” the security firm said. Trend Micro added that the threat is doubly dangerous as Apple had mistakenly told its users that most should be safe by default. “Users who configured to enable the Advanced Unix Services are still affected by this vulnerability,” read the post. “The Advanced Unix services enables remote access via Secure Shell which offers ease of access to system or network administrators in managing their servers. This service is most likely enabled for machines used as servers such as web servers, which are the common targets Shellshock attacks.” Apple released security patches to plug Shellshock for its OS X Maverick, Lion and Mountain Lion operating systems in September. The Trend Micro researchers added that IT managers should be on guard for the attack as it has advanced detection dodging powers. “When it connects to http://www[dot]computer-services[dot]name/b[dot]c, it downloads the Kaiten source code, which is then compiled using the common gcc compiler. This means that once connected to the URL, it won’t immediately download an executable file,” explained the researchers. “This routine could also be viewed as an evasion technique as some network security systems filter out non-executable files from scanning, due to network performance concerns. Systems configured this way may skip the scanning of the source code because it’s basically a text file.” The Kaiten attack is one of many recently discovered campaigns using Shellshock. Researchers from FireEye caught hackers exploiting the Shellshock Bash vulnerability to infect enterprise Network Attached Storage systems with malware at the end of September. Source: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2374038/hackers-using-shellshock-to-spread-kaiten-mac-os-ddos-malware

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Secondhand DDoS: Why hosting providers need to take action

Unfortunately, the sheer size and scale of hosting or datacenter operator network infrastructures and their massive customer base presents an incredibly attractive attack surface due to the multiple entry points and significant aggregate bandwidth that acts as a conduit for a damaging and disruptive DDoS attack. As enterprises increasingly rely on hosted critical infrastructure or services, they are placing themselves at even greater risk from these devastating cyber threats – even as an indirect target. What is secondhand DDoS? The multi-tenant nature of cloud-based data centres and shared, hosted environments can be less than forgiving for unsuspecting tenants. A DDoS attack, volumetric in nature against one tenant, can lead to disastrous repercussions for others; a domino effect of latency issues, service degradation and potentially damaging and long lasting service outages. The excessive amount of malicious traffic bombarding a single tenant during a volumetric DDoS attack can have adverse effects on other tenants as well as the overall data centre or hosting providers operation. In fact, it is becoming more common that attacks on a single tenant or service can completely choke up the shared infrastructure and bandwidth resources, resulting in the entire data centre can be taken offline or severely slowed – AKA, secondhand DDoS. Black-holing or black-hole routing is a common, crude defense against DDoS attacks, which is intended to mitigate secondhand DDoS. With this approach, the cloud or hosting provider blocks all packets destined for a domain by advertising a null route for the IP address (es) under attack. There are a number of problems with utilising this approach for defending against DDoS attacks: Most notably is the situation where multiple tenants share a public IP address range. In this case, all customers associated with the address range under attack will lose all service, regardless of whether they were a specific target of the attack. In effect, the data centre or hosting operator has finished the attacker’s job by completely DoS’ing their own customers. Furthermore, injection of null-routes is a manual process, which requires human analysts, workflow processes and approvals; increasing the time to respond to the attack, leaving all tenants of the shared environment suffering the consequences for extended periods of time, potentially hours. The growing dependence on the Internet makes the impact of successful DDoS attacks-financial and otherwise-increasingly painful for service providers, enterprises, and government agencies. And newer, more powerful DDoS tools promise to unleash even more destructive attacks in the months and years to come. Enterprises which rely on hosted infrastructure or services need to start asking the tough questions of their hosting or datacentre providers, as to how they will be properly protected when a DDoS attack strikes. As we’ve seen on numerous occasions, hosted customers are simply relying on their provider to ‘take care of the attacks’ when they occur, without fully understanding the ramifications of turning a blind eye to this type of malicious behavior. What to do to mitigate an attack and protect the infrastructure Here are three key steps for providers to consider to better protect their own infrastructure, and that of their customers. Eliminate the delays incurred between the time traditional monitoring devices detects a threat, generates an alert and an operator is able to respond; reducing initial attack impact from hours to seconds by deploying appliances that both monitor and mitigate DDoS threats automatically. The mitigation solution should allow for real-time reporting alert and event integration with back-end OSS infrastructure for fast reaction times, and the clear visibility needed to understand the threat condition and proactively improve DDoS defenses. Deploy the DDoS mitigation inline. If you have out-of-band devices in place to scrub traffic, deploy inline threat detection equipment quickly that can inspect, analyse and respond to DDoS threats in real-time. Invest in a DDoS mitigation solution that is architected to never drop good traffic. Providers should avoid the risk of allowing the security equipment to become a bottleneck in delivering hosted services—always allowing legitimate traffic to pass un-interrupted, a do no harm approach to successful DDoS defense. Enterprises rely on their providers to ensure availability and ultimately protection against DDoS attacks cyber threats. With a comprehensive first line of defense against DDoS attacks deployed, date centre and hosting providers are protecting its customers from damaging volumetric threats directed at or originating from or within its networks. Source: http://www.information-age.com/technology/security/123458517/secondhand-ddos-why-hosting-providers-need-take-action

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Secondhand DDoS: Why hosting providers need to take action

The History of DDoS Attacks as a Tool of Protest

Although the web is only a quarter of a century old, it already has a rich history as a platform for worldwide protest. One common tool used by online activists is the distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS: a technologically crude tactic that involves sending so many requests to a target website that it crashes. In recent years, politically motivated DDoS attacks have been launched on the websites of financial giants and local government departments. This year, websites affiliated with the football World Cup were brought down in protest against FIFA. “DDoS has been around as an activist tactic probably since the early 90s,” Molly Sauter, a research affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and doctoral student at McGill University, told me. Sauter is the author of the upcoming book The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism and Civil Disobedience , which details the history of the DDoS attack from an obscure, insular activity carried out by artists and intellectuals to a hallmark of 21 st century protest. The earliest example of a DDoS attack that Sauter found in her research was implemented by the Strano Network, an Italian collective that launched an attack in 1995 to protest against the French government’s nuclear policy. Back then, DDoS attacks were laborious, manual affairs, requiring participants to constantly remain at their computer. And because having an internet connection was relatively expensive, they couldn’t last for long. The attack in this case only endured for about an hour. The next major milestone was the use of DDoS by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Originating in the 90s, and attracting the attention of the media by the end of the decade, the hacktivist group described DDoS as akin to a “virtual sit-in.” One thing that separated them from their predecessors was their use of tools developed in-house, which allowed anyone outside of the organisation to join in. Their kit, called FloodNet, directed a user’s traffic to a target predetermined by the EDT, which included the websites of politicians and the White House. Those wishing to join the “sit-in” simply selected their target from a drop down menu, clicked attack, and relaxed while FloodNet automatically bombarded the offending server. The well-known hacker collective Anonymous took this idea of crowd-sourced activism further, and popularised the idea of voluntary botnets. Often used by criminals, a botnet is a large number of systems, all linked together, which give whoever is in charge of them a whole lot of processing power to wield. DDoS is incredibly simplistic, at a purely technological level. By using the hacker-designed software Low Orbit Ion Cannon, and its subsequent upgrades, participants could connect their computer to a vast network and have it donate resources to DDoS attacks. And that pretty much brings us up to today. “DDoS is incredibly simplistic, at a purely technological level,” Sauter said. “While there might be individual innovations in ways of masking or multiplying traffic, it’s not actually going to get much more advanced than that.” But it’s not just the technical details of DDoS that have mutated over the years. The scale of attacks using the device has developed, too. “Groups have become better at attracting, acknowledging and manipulating media coverage in order to attract more participants,” Sauter explained. While earlier groups just did their own thing, Anonymous managed to engage those outside of their immediate cohort more readily. With their iconic imagery, popular Twitter accounts and evocative videos, the media had a lot of material to work with. The press lacked any sort of official spokesperson of Anonymous to talk to—“So they just tended to reproduce these artifacts in media coverage, which did the work of recruitment for Anonymous,” Sauter observed. “Anonymous didn’t have to do a lot of ‘active’ outreach. That was being done for them.” What actually constitutes a ‘successful’ DDoS attack has also changed. “In the 90s, you could sit in front of your computer with your friends, go to whitehouse.gov, click refresh a bunch of times, and you had a significant chance of the website crashing,” said Sauter. An industry has since emerged to offer protection from DDoS attacks, so crashing a major service today is rarer, though still possible with some serious fire-power. But there’s another way to measure the success of DDoS actions than just website down time. Sauter explained that, when it comes to activism in general, “The logic of change is that you have an action, you get covered in the press, then politicians and the public react to the press coverage, not so much the action itself.” This overall impact is perhaps more important than how long a specific website is technically inaccessible. As Sauter said, “The question of what success means is fairly up in the air.” Some argue that DDoS as a protest tool should be formally recognised as political speech, and enjoy the same free-speech protections as street marches, for example. Jay Leiderman, a criminal defense lawyer, has argued that DDoS is a first amendment issue in defence of the “PayPal 14,” a group of WikiLeaks supporters involved in a DDoS attack against the e-commerce business. Attorney Stanley Cohen, who represented one of the accused, described the act as an “electronic sit in,” and members of Anonymous also created a petition, pushing for politically motivated DDoS to be legalised. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND OTHER TYPES OF ORGANISED LAW BREAKING ONLINE ARE STILL CONSIDERED VERY MUCH FRINGE ACTIVITIES. But DDoS can of course also be used for much less sympathetic purposes. “The biggest problem that activist DDoS faces in terms of its fight for legitimacy is criminal DDoS,” said Sauter. “DDoS is a very popular tactic in terms of harassment, extortion and other criminality.” For example, botnets for DDoSing purposes are reportedly already being created to exploit the Shell Shock bug, a recently revealed weakness in Linux and Unix operating systems. Furthermore, Sauter suggested that online activism in general still isn’t really accepted because it remains an alien concept to many people. “Civil disobedience and other types of organised law breaking online are still considered very much fringe activities because there isn’t an understanding that civil disobedience is something that you can do on the internet,” Sauter said. “That I hope is something that will change, but it will take a legal challenge.” But Sauter feels that political DDoS will continue to gain popularity when it comes to activism, and that it might even have something more to give. Whether it’s the Electronic Disturbance Theater protesting against neoliberalism, or Anonymous rising up to fight what they see as injustices, DDoS actions do not exist in a vacuum. Today, politically motivated DDoS is often part of a broader activist culture in the information age. Sauter suggested it could therefore introduce activists to other ideas, “such as information exfiltration, and leaking, and the construction of alternative infrastructures to replace the corporate-dominated and government-surveilled that are currently the main ways of socialising and communicating online.” In short, DDoS attacks in activist circles can be about more than just crashing a few servers. Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/history-of-the-ddos-attack

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The History of DDoS Attacks as a Tool of Protest

Global DDoS attack numbers decline, attacks from China rise

In the second quarter of 2014, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 161 unique countries/regions, which was 33 fewer than the first quarter of the year. The highest concentration of attacks…

Researcher details nasty XSS flaw in popular web editor

First denial, then anger, then DDoS , then patching. A tool that’s popular with Microsoft’s in-house developers, the RadEditor HTML editor, contains a dangerous cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability, researcher GS McNamara says.…

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Researcher details nasty XSS flaw in popular web editor

Spammer uses innocent hacked blogs to punt NAKED PICS of JLaw, McKayla Maroney

Gran’s knitting site etc sucked up into pr0n spam botnet A long established smut spammer is using hacked websites to sell stolen photographs of naked celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and McKayla Maroney.…

Ello social network hit by suspected BLOODY DDoS attack

Anti-Facebook site forced to temporarily wave Buh-Bye Ello, the social network site intended to serve as something of an antidote to ad-stuffed Facebook, was hit by a suspected Distributed-Denial-of-Service attack today.…

Hackers Are Already Using the Shellshock Bug to Launch Botnet Attacks

With a bug as dangerous as the “shellshock” security vulnerability discovered yesterday, it takes less than 24 hours to go from proof-of-concept to pandemic. As of Thursday, multiple attacks were already taking advantage of that vulnerability, a long-standing but undiscovered bug in the Linux and Mac tool Bash that makes it possible for hackers to trick Web servers into running any commands that follow a carefully crafted series of characters in an HTTP request. The shellshock attacks are being used to infect thousands of machines with malware designed to make them part of a botnet of computers that obey hackers’ commands. And in at least one case the hijacked machines are already launching distributed denial of service attacks that flood victims with junk traffic, according to security researchers. The attack is simple enough that it allows even unskilled hackers to easily piece together existing code to take control of target machines, says Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer for the web security firm Veracode. “People are pulling out their old bot kit command and control software, and they can plug it right in with this new vulnerability,” he says. “There’s not a lot of development time here. People were compromising machines within an hour of yesterday’s announcement.” Wysopal points to attackers who are using a shellshock exploit to install a simple Perl program found on the open source code site GitHub. With that program in place, a command and control server can send orders to the infected target using the instant messaging protocol IRC, telling it to scan other networked computers or flood them with attack traffic. “You install it on the server that you’re able to get remote command execution on and now you can control that machine,” says Wysopal. The hackers behind another widespread exploit using the Bash bug didn’t even bother to write their own attack program. Instead, they rewrote a proof-of-concept script created by security researcher Robert David Graham Wednesday that was designed to measure the extent of the problem. Instead of merely causing infected machines to send back a “ping” as in Graham’s script, however, the hackers’ rewrite instead installed malware that gave them a backdoor into victim machines. The exploit code politely includes a comment that reads “Thanks-Rob.” The “Thanks-Rob” attack is more than a demonstration. The compromised machines are lobbing distributed denial of service attacks at three targets so far, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs, though they haven’t yet identified those targets. The researchers at the Russian antivirus firm say they used a “honeypot” machine to examine the malware, locate its command and control server and intercept the DDoS commands it’s sending, but haven’t determined how many computers have already been infected. Based on his own scanning before his tool’s code was repurposed by hackers, Graham estimates that thousands of machines have been caught up in the botnet. But millions may be vulnerable, he says. And the malware being installed on the target machines allows itself to be updated from a command and control server, so that it could be changed to scan for and infect other vulnerable machines, spreading far faster. Many in the security community fear that sort of “worm” is the inevitable result of the shellshock bug. “This is not simply a DDoS trojan,” says Kaspersky researcher Roel Schouwenberg. “It’s a backdoor, and you can definitely turn it into a worm.” The only thing preventing hackers from creating that worm, says Schouwenberg, may be their desire to keep their attacks below the radar—too large of a botnet might attract unwanted attention from the security community and law enforcement. “Attackers don’t always want to make these things into worms, because the spread becomes uncontrollable,” says Schouwenberg. “It generally makes more sense to ration this thing out rather than use it to melt the internet.” The Bash bug, first discovered by security researcher Stéphane Chazelas and revealed Wednesday in an alert from the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT), still doesn’t have a fully working patch. On Thursday Linux software maker Red Hat warned that a patch initially released along with CERT’s alert can be circumvented. But Kaspersky’s Schouwenberg recommended that server administrators still implement the existing patch; While it’s not a complete cure for the shellshock problem, he says it does block the exploits he’s seen so far. In the meantime, the security community is still bracing for the shellshock exploit to evolve into a fully self-replicating worm that would increase the volume of its infections exponentially. Veracode’s Chris Wysopal says it’s only a matter of time. “There’s no reason someone couldn’t modify this to scan for more bash bug servers and install itself,” Wysopal says. “That’s definitely going to happen.” Source: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/hackers-already-using-shellshock-bug-create-botnets-ddos-attacks/