Security Incidents mailing list archives

Re: Virus/trojan tunnel out from behind firewall?


From: David Carmean <dlc () halibut com>
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 23:07:15 -0800

On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 10:22:12PM -0600, Rich Puhek wrote:
David Carmean wrote:

Have there been any cases of a trojan/virus/etc tunnelling out from
behind a firewall and thus providing an attacker a way into the
"chewy center"?

Do you mean a trojan/virus that actively establishes a tunnel through
SSH, etc to an outside machine as a method of bypassing a stateful
firewall?

Or do you just mean that a trojan/virus/etc has provided an opening
despite the firewall?

I'd also consider the gray areas in between, like worms/trojans that
transfer into (passwds, etc) back through SMTP, HTTP, or IRC.

I was thinking more of the first example, an ssh/stunnel/other tunnel 
out from the infected host to some other compromised box, which would 
give an attacker a wormhole into the center of a corporate network.  
In realtime.

For sites which allow unrestricted outbound connections, it would 
probably be impossible to detect if the trojan did nothing else 
destructive to arouse suspicion. 




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