An Information Security Place

A client called me at 8:30am yesterday in a panic because they have the Rinbot worm running around in their network. The client is actually a former employer of mine, and they still have much of the same hardware and software when I was there 6 years ago, which means Dell Pentium 3 400Mhz servers and NT 4.0. They kept cleaning up their servers and getting re-infected, so something was getting missed. They have servers spread out between their corporate site and their colocation facility, and the link between the two is a fiber link that has no firewall or any real segmentation at all. So, getting all the servers clean has proven problematic.

The recommended patch for NT to stop Rinbot didn’t work, so I had them temporarily disable the IPC$ share on their important servers, and today we are going to try Determina’s HIPS product to see if we can stop it and identify where it is coming from. We’ll see what happens.

It’s been a while since I have had to fight one of these buggers. It was actually quite refeshing. Something different, and it brought back memories.

Here’s a pretty cool blog post about Rinbot.

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Link

This is the trojan I mentioned in my last post.

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Go check out this article at Dark Reading.  Looks like this group is creating a botnet with a trojan that has a cracked version of Kaspersky AV to clean machines (except for itself, of course) to make sure it gets all the bandwidth it can to send out spam.  It is called the SpamThru trojan. 

This is crazy.

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Thanks to the SecurityCurve blog for posting this about Apple.  The Mac users are going to get hard one day, and they are not going to be prepared.  Yes, many of them use AV software, but my suspicion is that many do not run it because they don’t see a reason for it.  Take a look at this post to see if you think I am wrong.  Though the author admits that it may happen one day, he is just so smug (to use SecurityCurve’s analogy) that his Mac is just wonderfully immune right now.

What I see is this: Malware is more and more specific now days.  It is written for monetary gain, not for kicks (it is possible someone may write something just to prove Apple wrong, but who knows).  Apple will get more and more of the market.  Their servers, because more people are using Macs in business, will start to get more popular (just like with Windows).  Then more and more valuable data will be stored on Apple servers, and the possibility of monetary gain will increase.  So the possibilty of malware will increase.

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