The story behind the Microsoft Nitol Botnet takedown

13. September 2012 · Comments Off on The story behind the Microsoft Nitol Botnet takedown · Categories: blog · Tags: , , , , , , ,

Earlier today Microsoft announced the takedown of the Nitol botnet and takeover of the 3322.org domain. However, if you are using the Damballa flow-based Detection Control, this was a non-event. Full disclosure – Cymbel partners with Damballa.

Gunter Ollman, Damballa’s CTO, today commented on Nitol and 3322.org, and the ramifications of the Microsoft takedown, which I will summarize.

First, Damballa has been tracking Nitol and the other 70 or so botnets leveraging 3322.org for quite some time. Therefore, as a Damballa user, any device on your network infected with Nitol, or the other 70 botnets leveraging 3322.org, would be identified by Damballa. Furthermore, if you were using Damballa’s blocking capabilities, those devices would be prevented from communicating with their malware’s Command & Control (C&C) servers.

Second, most of these 70+ botnets make use of “multiple C&C domain names distributed over multiple DNS providers. Botnet operators are only too aware of domain takedown orders from law enforcement, so they add a few layers of resilience to their C&C infrastructure to protect against that kind of disruption.” Therefore this takedown did not kill these botnets.

In closing, while botnet and DNS provider takedowns are interesting, they simply do not reduce an organization’s risk of data breaches. Damballa does!!

 

 

Zero-day exploit trade impact on enterprises

21. August 2012 · Comments Off on Zero-day exploit trade impact on enterprises · Categories: blog · Tags: , , , , , ,

SC Magazine’s Dan Kaplan’s on The Hypocrisy of the zero-day exploit trade shows that enterprises can no longer rely on signature-based Detection Controls to mitigate the risks of confidential data breaches resulting from compromised devices.

I am surely not saying that signature-based IPS/IDS controls are dead, as you do want to detect and block known threats. However, IPS/IDS’s are surely no longer sufficient. They must be complemented by a behavior analysis Detection Control (flow and DNS analysis) as part of a redesigned Defense-in-Depth architecture.

 

New commercial DDoS botnet discovered

15. September 2010 · Comments Off on New commercial DDoS botnet discovered · Categories: blog · Tags: , , , , , ,

Via SC Magazine article, a new commercial DDoS botnet  has been discovered. IMDDOS is growing at a rate of 10,000 devices per day. Note that this is a commercial effort:

Literally anyone who can read or work with a Mandarin Chinese website can go onto their self-service portal, create an account and pick their victim of choice for a DDoS attack.

The botnet’s C&C domains, located in China, are used to push out instructions to infected bots to launch DDoS attacks against a list of targeted domains. Researchers are unsure of the price of IMDDOS attack services and do not know the actual domain names targeted by IMDDOS customers.

Full disclosure: While this article was “stimulated” by Damballa’s VP of Marketing, I still thought it was newsworthy. We partner with FireEye, a Damballa competitor.