Current Network Security Threats

 

 

 

 

Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University, Noida

 

Current Network Security Threats

 

2007

 

These Documents Are For Educational Purpose

Presented here by

Gautam Sarswat

Contact at : gautam.sarswat.jbs@gmail.com

 

 

 

Outline

• Network Telescope

• Denial-of-Service Attacks

• Viruses and Worms

• Botnets

Network Telescope

• Chunk of (globally) routed IP address space – 16 million IP addresses

• Little or no legitimate traffic (or easily filtered)

• Unexpected traffic arriving at the network telescope can imply remote network/security events

• Generally good for seeing explosions, not small Events

• Depends on random component in spread

Network Telescope: Denial-of-Service Attacks

• Attacker floods the victim with requests using random spoofed source IP addresses

• Victim believes requests are legitimate and responds to each spoofed address

• According to observation 1/256th of all victim responses to spoofed addresses

Denial-of-Service Attacks

Analysis DoS Attacks over time

Network Telescope Observation Station

• http://www.caida.org/data/realtime/telescope/

• Prevalence and trends in spoofed-source denial-of-service attacks

– http://www.caida.org/data/realtime/telescope/?monitor

=telescope_backscatter

• (live demo)

What is a Network Worm?

• Self-propagating self-replicating network program

– Exploits some vulnerability to infect remote machines

• No human intervention necessary

– Infected machines continue propagating infection

Network Telescope: Worm Attacks

• Infected host scans for other vulnerable hosts by randomly generating IP addresses

• It monitor 1/256th of all IPv4 addresses

• It see 1/256th of all worm traffic of worms with no bias and no bugs

Witty Worm Background

March 19, 2004

• ISS Vulnerability

– A buffer overflow in a PAM (Protocol Analysis Module) in a Internet Security Systems firewall products

• Version 3.6.16 of iss-pam1.dll

– Analyzes ICQ traffic (inbound port 4000)

– Discovered by eEye on March 8, 2004

– Jointly announced March 18,2004 when “patch” available

• Upgrade to the next version at customer cost…

• By far the closest to a zero-day exploit

– Instead of 2-4 weeks after bug release, Witty appeared after 36 hours

Witty Worm Structure

March 19, 2004

• Infects a host running an ISS firewall product

• Sends 20,000 UDP packets as quickly as possible:

– to random source IP addresses

– to random destination port

– with random size between 796 and 1307 bytes

• Damage Victim:

– select random physical device

– seek to random point on that device

– attempt to write over 65k of data with a copy of the beginning of the vulnerable dll

• Repeat until machine is rebooted or machine crashes irreparably

Typical (Code-Red) Host Infection Rate

Early Growth of Witty (5 minutes)

Witty Worm Spread

March 19, 2004

• Sharp rise via initial coordinated activity

• Peaked after approximately 45 minutes

– Approximately 30 minutes later than the fastest worm we’ve seen so far (SQL Slammer)

– Still far faster than any human response

– At peak, Witty generated:

• 90 GB/sec of network traffic

• 11 million packets per second

Early Growth of Witty (2 hours)

Early Growth of Witty (3 days)

Witty Worm Victims

• Consistent with past worms:

– Globally distributed

– Majority high-bandwidth home/small business users

• Unique victim characteristics

– 100% taking proactive security measures

– Infected via software they ran purposefully

Geographic Spread of Witty

Witty Summary

• ~12,000 hosts infected in 30 minutes

• Averaged more than 11 million probes per second world-wide

• Unstoppable

• Irreparably destroyed a significant number of infected computers

Conclusions

• Witty incorporates a number of novel and disturbing features:

– Next day exploit for publicized bug

– Wide-scale deployment

– Successful exploit of small population (no more security through obscurity)

– Future worms will continue to emulate botnets

– increasing levels of stealth and flexibility

– Infected a security product

• Witty demonstrates conclusively that the patch model of networked device security has

failed

– You can’t encourage people to sign on to the ‘net with one click and then also expect them to be security experts

– Running commercial firewall software at their own expense is the gold standard for end user behavior

• Recognition that security is important

• Recognition that they can’t do it themselves

• End-user behavior cannot solve current software security problems

• End-user behavior cannot effectively mitigate current software security problems

• We must:

– Actively address prevention of software vulnerabilities

– Turn our attention to developing large-scale, robust, reliable infrastructure that can mitigate current security problems without end-user intervention

About Blackworm

• Began to spread January 15, 2006

• 95k Visual Basic executable email attachment run by users

• Also spread to attached network shares

• Malicious: on the 3rd day of every month:

– searches for files with 12 common file extensions (.doc, .xls, .mdb, .mde, .ppt, .pps, .zip, .rar, .pdf, .psd,and .dmp)

– replaces those files with the text string “DATA Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 K5]“

So who cares?

• Blackworm is not particularly different from many, many other email viruses, except…

• Every infected computer automatically generates an http request for a web page that displayed a hit count graph (self-documenting code?)

• Logs for the website were available before the first date of payload destruction

• Some victims could be notified before they lost data

Log Analysis

• Simple! Just take the logs and look at who connected and you’ll have the infected IP

addresses!

• Except that the url was publicized…

• Many folks looked at the page to observe the spread of the virus

• Denial-of-service attacks added a large volume of spurious traffic

Log Filtering

• Why not just count IP addresses that were logged once?

• Web traffic aggregators (NAT, proxy servers) obscure victim IP addresses; multiple probes can represent multiple infections

• DHCP use allows two different computers to have the same IP at the time that they

become infected

Log Filtering Process

• Remove referer/browser strings set by common DDoS tools (91.1% of all hits)

• Remove requests for pages different from the one accessed by the virus (0.2%)

• Remove any request with a referer string (virus did not use one in its probes) (0.8%)

• Remove requests from invulnerable Operating Systems: MacOS, Unix, cell phone, and PDA devices (0.03%)

Sources of Error and Uncertainty

• Infected computers that failed to send the probe

• Network firewalls or outages that prevented victims from reaching the web page

• Denial-of-Service attacks preventing infected computers from reaching the web page

• People who viewed the counter only once using a vulnerable browser, but were not infected

Estimating a Victim Count

• Lower bound: for each IP address, the number of unique, vulnerable browser types received from that IP address

• Upper bound: for each IP address, the total number of probes received from that IP address

• Blackworm victim estimate: between 469,507 and 946,835 (3.2%-6.4% of original log entries)

Blackworm Overall

Blackworm by Continent

Blackworm by Country (>2%)

Concurrent Infections

• 45,401 Blackworm victims (10%) had concurrent spyware and/or botnet infections advertised in their browser string

– Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Sgrunt|V109|29|S493689067|dial; FunWebProducts; XBE|29|S04069679521143#398|isdn; snprtz|S04138822910124)

Conclusions

• Log analysis allows insight into email virus spread given sufficient data mining

• Email viruses spread in a slower and steadier pattern than Internet worms, which infect the vast majority of their victims in the first day

• Diurnal patterns are strongly apparent in spread data (people read their email when

they are awake)

• Country distribution of victims does not correlate with web infrastructure development

• Spread strongly influenced by geographic location (based on social and linguistic similarity)

• TLD distribution reflects geographic distribution rather than # of vulnerable hosts/TLD

• 10% of victims had concurrent botnet or spyware infection

Botnets

• Significant transition in motivation for widespread, non-specific malicious activity

– From notoriety -> want to be noticed

– To money -> want stealth to protect revenue stream

• So how do you make money?

– Sending spam

– DoS extortion

– Active (phishing) and passive identity theft

Current Events

• Malicious software development is a business aimed at scalable, manageable

distributed systems

• Coordinated activity makes current antivirus activities increasingly irrelevant

• Demise of signature-based security?

• High system complexity + naïve/uneducated = bad combination Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis Current Security Research

• Longitudinal study of Blackworm

• Spamscatter

• Botnet Economics

• Worm Risk Analysis

• Anomaly Detection

Reference

http://www.caida.org