FBI blows Code Red all-clear

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21117.html

By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 18/08/2001 at 19:35 GMT

The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) has issued
a bulletin stating that "the Internet threat posed by Code Red when it
changes from a scanning mode to an active distributed denial of
service (DDoS) mode at 8pm (EDT) on August 19, 2001 is significantly
reduced."

All right, that's correct in a sense, but it's still misleading. The
threat to the Internet never existed in the first place, as we've made
clear in increasingly satirical coverage of the doomsayers'
prognostications from the outset.

What they ought to have said is that the imaginary threat to the
Internet, which world and dog have been hooting about over the past
eight weeks, now looks to them like the non-story we told you it was
from day one.

Not so fast

However, there is still a significant threat here, though for some
reason all the world's Net security experts, laid end-to-end, have
been unable to reach it.

So we'll break it down for you one more time: Both versions of Code
Red cause infected machines to scan for additional victims. By
scanning, they're broadcasting their IPs to the world, letting us know
that they're vulnerable to the .ida hole which the worm exploits.

This is a crucial tidbit because the .ida hole can give up
system-level access to a vulnerable machine. Systems infected with
Code Red One require that the attacker know how to exploit the hole,
which is far from brain surgery but it does require some knowledge or
at least a bit of reading. Those infected with Code Red Two have a
little Trojan installed automatically, which lets even clueless
newbies Telnet in without the slightest difficulty.

This is, always has been, and always will be the true threat of Code
Red, and it's actually quite serious if you happen to have anything on
your system which you'd prefer not to share with anonymous Web
surfers.

It also happens to be the most under-reported aspect of it, because
the media greatly prefer feeding on fantasies of world catastrophe
over real nuts-and-bolts problems.

Our expectations of the media are already so low that we have trouble
even caring about how poor their coverage was. But we can, and should,
expect better from NIPC. If the new Director, Ron Dick, is going to
revive the Center and improve its reputation, then he's got to ensure
that it doesn't hype imaginary threats while turning a blind eye to
less-than-sexy real ones.



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