March 4th, 2010
The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was this morning’s keynote speaker at RSA Conference 2010, speaking about succeeding in the cybersecurity battle. She joins the list of prominent speakers this week, along with Symantec’s Enrique Salem on “Defeating the Enemy: The Road to Confidence”. The conference continues through the week, and you can keep up to date with links to interactive webcasts here.
This year’s Cryptographer’s Panel discussed some interesting work on the new MD6 hash algorithm within the SHA-3 Competition, and MD5 as a ”dead hash algorithm”. This talk marked hopefully the last year of commercial Md5 use, in light of Md5’s fairly substantial and vulnerable use by vendors, webmasters and Certificate Authorities up through the beginning of 2009. May its death arrive quickly and a new, performance sensitive MD6 born soon.
Posted in Conference, Government and Cybersecurity | No Comments »
March 2nd, 2010
Spanish law enforcement nabbed three operators of the Mariposa botnet: “Authorities identified them by their Internet handles and their ages: “netkairo,” 31; “jonyloleante,” 30; and “ostiator,” 25.”
The massive infection rate described in the article presents just another reason why you need our quiet ThreatFire product protecting your workstation. On a weekly basis, thousands of updated ThreatFire-protected systems were attacked and protected from variants of the bots with a feature we call “behavioral recognition”. It is far superior to AV file scanner signatures and definitively identifies the behavior of malware families like the bots that were a part of the Mariposa botnet. Problems with signature based AV scanner recognition and various Mariposa variant bots were described in a technical paper here.
If you saw a red dialog from ThreatFire warning that it is protecting your system from “Worm.Palevo” or “W32.Pilleuz”, your system was protected from becoming another one of over 12 million Mariposa victims.
Posted in Bot, Crimeware, Evasion technique, IM Worm, Malware Counts, Obfuscation, Password stealing, Uncategorized, Worm | 1 Comment »
February 26th, 2010
A recently reworded post on Microsoft’s attempt to pursue malware distribution in the courts makes it appear that something permanent and substantial has happened in anti-malware efforts (demonstrated by a legal and collaborative effort called “Operation b49″ to takedown Waledac C&C domains). Because of the complications (legal and otherwise) delaying server and domain takedowns, it’s great to see this botnet’s well-known command and control server domains pursued by the powerful legal team. On the other hand, in the meantime, users’ systems continue to be infected with Waledac. And much like the FakeAv organizations and the “John Doe” defendants that Microsoft has filed against in the courts in the past, cybercriminals herding Waledac most likely will pick up and continue to operate in the shadows beyond the reach of law enforcement — the domains and malware most likely will change to evade the takedowns pushed by their court approach. It’s a situation that has been described as “wrestling with a pig”.
In the meantime, the best way to protect yourself is with the latest install of ThreatFire. From our statistics in the ThreatFire community, we see that Waledac binaries continue to attack systems on a daily basis as a bump on the “threat landscape”. The ISC’s post title mistakenly implies that Waledac is not infecting system’s on a daily basis because the group’s “Storm-like” spam campaigns of 2009 have discontinued and because a specific list of domains have been removed, but in fact, Waledac binaries like these are attacking systems on a daily basis. For instance, over the past few days, workstations in the ThreatFire community were attacked by and protected from Waledac in the US and parts of Europe.
Anyways, the ISC handler’s post was an interesting writeup and description of past problems in takedowns (current collateral damage described here), and “Operation b49” adds another strong effort and collaboration to clean up the wild wild web. Cheers to that. Let’s hope that the Waledac bot distributors and botnet operators are worn down with the new strategy while watching their C&C servers becoming unreachable. We’ll monitor the bot’s distribution over the next few weeks and post results. Hopefully, the group is worn down for good.
Posted in Bot, Crimeware, Spam, Waledac | No Comments »
