Sub7 vid Trojan can launch distributed attacks

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/11424.html

By: Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 16/06/2000 at 22:38 GMT

Last week we expressed doubts about a report from security outfit
NETSEC, claiming that they had found a new Trojan capable of launching
DDoS attacks.

Their "new" Trojan turned out to be Sub7, a remote administration
package which had been around for years, and which we deemed an
improbable candidate for DDoS.

After discovering first that NETSEC was wrong about the novelty of
their discovery, and after assessing the relatively low threat Sub7
posed in the DDoS arena, we drew the natural conclusion that the
company was yanking the media's chain for attention.

Subsequent e-mail correspondence between The Register and NETSEC
executives further persuaded us that the company did not have its
facts straight, and was scrambling for after-the-fact validation of
its original claims.

Now we learn that NETSEC was on the right track after all, and if they
had simply waited until they had a firm handle on their find instead
of disgorging inaccurate data through the media in their rush to get
attention, they might have spared themselves a significant PR cock-up,
and won some serious props in the security community.

As it turns out, the most recent build of Sub7 contains an
undocumented feature which can indeed be used to ping the living hell
out of Web servers, from numerous infected clients simultaneously,
according to research just completed by security outfit iDefense.

Sub7 has long used an IRC feature which logs the infected servers into
an IRC channel of the operator's choosing, to notify the operator of
which victims are on line. At that point the operator can log on to a
victim's computer using the Sub7 client, and go about whatever remote
administration tasks he had in mind.

A later feature configured the IRC bots to listen for commands entered
in the IRC channel, which would be executed simultaneously by all the
victims logged into it.

Now for the interesting bit: Although the Sub7 crew has decided not to
document it, IRC bots in the new build will listen for and respond to
ping and mping commands, iDefense Chief Scientist Sammy Migues told
The Register.

So, if one has managed to infect, say, a thousand victims, and could
reasonably expect perhaps 250 of them to be on line together at any
given time, one could run an mping command through all of them
simultaneously.

An attacker can choose a target IP; command the 250 victim machines to
send say, one million packets of 64K each; and, voila, an instant, and
distributed, ping flood.

The complete iDefense report is posted here in PDF format, for those
who wish to acquaint themselves with all the gruesome technical
details.

http://www.idefense.com/pages/ialertexcl/eccentric0001.Sub7.pdf

ISN is sponsored by SecurityFocus.com
---
To unsubscribe email LISTSERV () SecurityFocus com with a message body of
"SIGNOFF ISN".