TrendLabs has a nice article on the botnet business model. It features an illustration showing the relationships between different botnets including CUTWAIL, BREDO, KOOBFACE, ZEUS, WALEDEC, and others.
The level of cooperation and coordination is stunning. If you are not monitoring for and blocking botnet activity in your organization, you are exposing your organization to serious risks. If you are seeing no botnet activity in your organization, you are not using the right tools.
Brian Krebs wrote another article about the rising number of E-Banking funds transfer fraud incidents where the Zeus trojan/botnet is used to compromise end point systems. The man-in-the-browser (MITB) exploit is a version of the classic man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack where the user’s bank credentials are stolen without the user realizing it. In fact, the Zeus trojan goes on “to control what the user sees on his or her browser.”
One is left to ask, is there is no “inline” defense against the Zeus trojan? In other words, is there no end point anti-malware product that can successfully defend against morphing trojans/botnets like Zeus?
It appears that the best choices at present are:
Use a dedicated PC, preferably one that boots from a CD, to do your online banking
Depend on your bank to:
Use behavior anomaly detection systems to catch/stop fraudulent transactions
Refund fraudulent transactions after the fact
Alternatively from a bank process perspective, why not require a 48 hour waiting period between the time a new payee is created and the time a payment can be made to that new payee?
In addition, the bank could add another step to the “add a payee process” where the bank sends an email or even hard copy notification of the new payee to the user (payer) and the user has to call from a known home phone number to verify the new payee.
Clearly these steps would add a level of inconvenience to online banking, but that has to be weighed against the costs of reimbursing consumer and corporate customer losses. If the lawsuits in progress are adjudicated in favor of the corporations suing their banks, we may very well see these or other changes.
The "quality" of phishing emails continues to improve. In other words, the attackers continue to make their phishing emails seem legitimate and thus trick more people into taking the emails' suggested actions. An article in Dark Reading this week discusses research done by F-Secure about new, more convincing, phishing attacks generated by the Zbot botnet which attempts to infect victims with the Zeus trojan. I wrote about how the Zeus trojan is used as a keylogger to steal banking credentials which enable funds transfer fraud.
While one might have considered the Dark Reading article a public relations piece for F-Secure, its validity was increased for me by Rich Mogull at Securosis who wrote about "the first phishig email I almost fell for," i.e. one of these Zbot phishing emails.
If a security person like Rich Mogull, who has the requisite security "paranoia DNA" can almost be fooled, then the phishing attackers are indeed improving their social engineering craft.
If you think your organization is free of botnet controlled hosts (aka zombies), it's only because you don't have the right detection tools! For example, Damballa, a botnet detection company claims that every organization it has tested was infected. And the number of infected hosts is rising – from 5% to 7% last year to 7% to 9% this year.
In one sense, this is a shocking number, i.e. almost 10% of the hosts in your network are controlled by botnets. On the other hand, not so much because I have yet to find an enterprise with hosts not running non-compliant or non-monitored software.
Another interesting finding from Damballa's research is the proliferation of small, customized botnets. Here is a quote from the Dark Reading article:
"The bad guys are also finding that deploying a
small botnet inside a targeted organization is a more efficient way of
stealing information than deploying a traditional exploit on a specific
machine. And [Damballa VP of Research Gunter] Ollmann says many of the smaller botnets appear to have
more knowledge of the targeted organization as well. "They are very
strongly associated with a lot of insider knowledge…and we see a lot
of hands-on command and control with these small botnets," he says.
There are several advanced security tools that can be easily deployed in a couple of days that will pinpoint non-compliant and non-monitored software and network communications.