Microsoft website hacked Code RED worm virus to hit

[thekingofpain]

Msoft website hacked today, "Hacked by Chinese" who knows yet how many sites have been affected due to replication, supposed to kick in 8 pm eastern and knock out huge chunks of the internet tonight---anyone have more info??? Reports are 12,000 servers are already infected.

"They" are now estimating 15,000-300,000 servers could be infected...

[This message has been edited by thekingofpain (edited 07-19-2001).]

[Richard_Cranium72]

I noticed that a few of my regular sites were down today, including www.techbargains.com (http://www.techbargains.com)

I wonder if the hack had anything to do with them ?

[thekingofpain]

NT and W2k servers are attackable, there is a patch available from Microsoft they are urging system admins to implement immediately: http://microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-033.asp
Info has been known about this since June but EI Digital in Irvine found it active a couple days ago and dubbed it "Code RED", today MSN website was taken down with one blow...

[kenyg]

caused a lot of problems at work today. we had one server that we had to reconfigure - what a headache.


Ken

[thekingofpain]

8 pm est comes and goes, maybe alot to do about nothin :-)

[desmocat]

A ducati forum that I frequent(HA..imagine that.. )was hit by this today. The webmaster had it back and going again after a short while, so it must not be extremely bad.

[socalgal]

From a CERT Advisory; SANS is also reporting it as a Special Alert.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Systems Affected

Systems running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 with IIS 4.0
or IIS 5.0 enabled

Overview

The CERT/CC has received reports of new self-propagating malicious
code that exploits certain configurations of Microsoft Windows
susceptible to the vulnerability described in CERT advisory CA-2001-13
Buffer Overflow In IIS Indexing Service DLL. These reports indicate
that the "Code Red" worm may have already affected as many as 225,000
hosts, and continues to spread rapidly.

Description

In examples we have seen, the "Code Red" worm attack proceeds as
follows:
* The victim host is scanned for TCP port 80 by the "Code Red" worm.
* The attacking host sends a crafted HTTP GET request to the victim,
attempting to exploit a buffer overflow in the Indexing Service
described in CERT advisory CA-2001-13
* If the exploit is successful, the worm begins executing on the
victim host. Initially, the existence of the c:\notworm file is
checked. Should this file be found, the worm ceases execution.
* If c:\notworm is not found, the worm begins spawning threads to
scan seemingly random IP addresses for hosts listening on TCP port
80, exploiting any vulnerable hosts it finds.
* If the victim host's default language is English, then after 100
scanning threads have started and a certain period of time has
elapsed following infection, all web pages served by the victim
host are defaced with the message

HELLO! Welcome to http://www.worm.com! Hacked By Chinese!

* If the victim host's default language is not English, the worm
will continue scanning but no defacement will occur.

System Footprint

The "Code Red" worm can be identified on victim machines by the
presence of the following string in IIS log files:

/default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u780 1%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%
u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u0 0c3%u0003%u8b00%u531
b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a

Additionally, web pages on victim machines may be defaced with the
following message:

HELLO! Welcome to http://www.worm.com! Hacked By Chinese!

The text of this page is stored exclusively in memory and is not
written to disk. Therefore, searching for the text of this page in the
file system may not detect compromise.

Network Footprint

A host running an active instance of the "Code Red" worm scans random
IP addresses on port 80/TCP looking for other hosts to infect.

Additional detailed analysis of this worm has been published by eEye
Digital Security at http://www.eeye.com.

Impact

In addition to web site defacement, infected systems may experience
performance degradation as a result of the scanning activity of this
worm.

Non-compromised systems and networks that are being scanned by other
hosts infected by the "Code Red" worm may experience severe denial of
service. This occurs because each instance of the "Code Red" worm uses
the same random number generator seed to create the list of IP
addresses it scans. Therefore, all victim hosts scan the same IP
addresses.

Furthermore, it is important to note that while the "Code Red" worm
appears to merely deface web pages on affected systems and attack
other systems, the IIS indexing vulnerability it exploits can be used
to execute arbitrary code in the Local System security context. This
level of privilege effectively gives an attacker complete control of
the victim system.

Solutions

The CERT/CC encourages all Internet sites to review CERT advisory
CA-2001-13 and ensure workarounds or patches have been applied on all
affected hosts on your network.

If you believe a host under your control has been compromised, you may
wish to refer to

http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/win-UNIX-system_compromise.html

Reporting

The CERT/CC is interested in receiving reports of this activity. If
machines under your administrative control are compromised, please
send mail to cert@cert.org with the following text included in the
subject line: "[CERT#36881]".


[This message has been edited by socalgal (edited 07-19-2001).]

[smunzli]

this is why i use UNIX!!!

[This message has been edited by smunzli (edited 07-20-2001).]

[Toadman]

Looks like the White House site is down today as well. Crafty how it is disguised as a MSoft Security Bulletin. Read here. (http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/07/17/disguised.worm.idg/index.html)

[thekingofpain]

Alittle more news, seems as it could be an ongoing thing: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/kpix/20010720/lo/851_1.html