Bugtraq mailing list archives

bitchx sources trojaned - follow up


From: Michał Szwaczko <mikey () wirelabs lublin pl>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 22:17:26 +0200

It seems that my posts have been misfired a little.

Let me summarize how,when and why I got trojaned sources 
Since I am not a security guru whatsoever I couldn't know that this 
issue is already known. Anyway, it did happen to me this Saturday 
so there is a possibility that something weird is lingering at ftp.bitchx.org
or its DNS servers.
 
So,

I fired up www.bitchx.org Saturday 13.04.2003 about 22:00 local time.
I went to download.php and checked the URL for source tarball. 
I wget'ted that URL - on saturday it showed:

ftp://ftp2.bitchx.org/pub/BitchX/source/ircii-pana-1.0c19.tar.gz
(I double-checked wget command line that I issued)

I archived the said file,it's MD5 checksum is:

sh> md5sum ircii-pana-1.0c19.tar.gz
927163e0466884b2771ae769e5c775d0  ircii-pana-1.0c19.tar.gz

I started ./configure script and noticed outbound connections to port 6667.
They were firewall-blocked anyway and that's why they really caught my eye.
Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have noticed them and perhaps would not have
bothered. 

So,I inspected ./configure and found the piece of code I was sending to the list.

All I was asking for was to verify that this was a backdoor, since I really
didn't know about it and it looked like one (at least my C knowledge said so)
(well I heard about irssi 'patched' that way)

My impression after all your posts saying that the bitchx.org sources are OK
is that on Saturday two things could have happened. 

- some sort of dns spoofing which fooled wget to fetch 'bad' tarball
 (notice I was downloading from ftp_2_.bitchx.org)
- modified webpage showing 'wrong' URL

I am 100% sure that I was getting the URL from the official www.bitchx.org.
So what do you think? 

ps. I am not doing all this just to get bugtraq'ed ;-) I just thought 
there's something weird lurking around at www.bitchx.org. I am not a 
security inspector/advisor nor do I have sufficient knowledge so I decided 
to discuss it here.   

Regards
-- 
Michał 'Mikey' Szwaczko
Developer/Troubleshooter

gcc is really a compressor - it gets 100M of kernel sources down to 700k.


Current thread: