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Researchers infiltrate Kraken botnet
But hesitate to clean up citing liability issues.
By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld (US online)
Published: 09:25 GMT, 01 May 08
A group of security researchers Wednesday said they have infiltrated one of the world's biggest botnets and can snatch control of compromised machines from the hackers.
But while 3Com's TippingPoint researchers say they have the ability to disinfect the systems by eradicating the malware installed on the hijacked PCs, the company has decided against the move, citing liability issues.
Pedram Amini, who leads TippingPoint's security research group, and Cody Pierce, a security researcher who is also part of that team, collaborated on a weeklong project that started with the idea of verifying the size of the "Kraken" botnet but ended with an ethical quandary.
Pierce created a fake Kraken command-and-control server by reverse engineering the list of domain names found in a captured sample of the bot, and then registered some of the sub-domains Kraken looks for. The server essentially acted as a command-and-control honeypot that waited for connections from PCs infected with the bot.
"Stated simply, Kraken infected systems worldwide start to connect to a server we control," Amini said in a post to a company blog.
The two researchers monitored the incoming communications from Kraken bots for seven days, Pierce said. "We listened and collected statistics for a week, and filtered out [for] the IP addresses and then the systems," he said on the telephone Wednesday." He was able to identify each infected machine by using the malware's encryption key, which was unique across the entire botnet.
The total count for the week: about 25,000 infected machines.
Others have estimated Kraken's size at between 185,000 and 600,000 compromised PCs. SecureWorks' Joe Stewart, who uses the moniker "Bobax" rather than Kraken for the botnet, pegged it at the lower number earlier this month based on an in-depth traffic analysis and bot-fingerprinting project.
In other words, TippingPoint had identified between 4 percent and 14 percent of the total Kraken botnet.
Add your commentComments
Dante | Published: 17:03 GMT, 01 May 2008
Post the hijack codes and I'll do it. I'll send out a kill virus to each and every one of these zombie retards. Kill off their PC's and when they buy new ones and get infected again because of their desire for "free" stuff, I'll kill it again. Their PC's will keep dying until they learn to stay off the Internet and stop spamming us. You don't let bad drivers on the highway, why let bad PC infestations on the Internet highway?
Matt | Published: 15:55 GMT, 01 May 2008
There needs to be a way to notify the owners of infected machines in a verifiable way and allow them start the disinfection process themselves.