"Kneber Botnet" Targets Corporate Networks and Credentials
HERNDON , VA - February 18, 2010 - NetWitness, the world leader in advanced persistent threat detection and real-time network forensics, announced today that its analysts have discovered a dangerous new ZeuS botnet affecting 75,000 systems in 2,500 organizations around the world. The newly-discovered infestation, dubbed the "Kneber botnet" after the username linking the infected systems worldwide, gathers login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and email systems from infested computers and reports the information to miscreants who can use it to break into accounts, steal corporate and government information, and replicate personal, online and financial identities.
NetWitness first discovered the Kneber botnet in January during a routine deployment of the NetWitness advanced monitoring solutions. Deeper investigation revealed an extensive compromise of commercial and government systems that included 68,000 corporate login credentials, access to email systems, online banking sites, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other social networking credentials, 2,000 SSL certificate files, and dossier-level data sets on individuals including complete dumps of entire identities from victim machines.
Discussing the importance of the Kneber botnet, Amit Yoran, CEO of NetWitness and former Director of the National Cyber Security Division, said, "While Operation Aurora shed light on advanced threats from sponsored adversaries, the number of compromised companies and organizations pales in comparison to this single botnet. These large-scale compromises of enterprise networks have reached epidemic levels. Cyber criminal elements, like the Kneber crew quietly and diligently target and compromise thousands of government and commercial organizations across the globe. Conventional malware protection and signature based intrusion detection systems are by definition inadequate for addressing Kneber or most other advanced threats. Organizations which focus on compliance as the objective of their information security programs and have not kept pace with the rapid advances of the threat environment will not see this Trojan until the damage already has occurred. Systems compromised by this botnet provide the attackers not only user credentials and confidential information, but remote access inside the compromised networks."
"Many security analysts tend to classify ZeuS solely as a Trojan that steals banking information," stated Alex Cox, the Principal Analyst at NetWitness responsible for uncovering the Kneber-bot, "but that viewpoint is naive. When we began to detect the correlation among both the methodology used by the Kneber crew to attack victim machines and the wide variety of data sets harvested, it became clear that security teams must rethink their entire perspective on advanced threats such as ZeuS and consider more diverse mission objectives."
Over half the machines infected with Kneber also were infected with Waledac, a peer to peer botnet. The coexistence of ZeuS and Waledac suggests the goals of resilience and survivability and potential deeper cross-crew collaboration in the criminal underground.
"NetWitness enables the discovery of malicious code like Kneber - before things get critical and valuable data is lost," said Cox. "It is 100% certain that many organizations have no idea they are victimized by these types of problems because they're just not tooled to see them on their networks. The Kneber botnet is just one category of advanced threat that organizations have been facing the past few years that they are still largely ignorant or blind to today."
To download a copy of the NetWitness Kneber whitepaper, visit http://www.netwitness.com.
About NetWitness
NetWitness® Corporation is the world leader in real-time network forensics and automated threat intelligence solutions, helping government and commercial organizations detect, prioritize and remediate complex IT risks. NetWitness solutions concurrently solve a wide variety of information security problems including: advanced persistent threat management; sensitive data discovery and advanced data leakage detection; malware activity discovery; insider threat management; policy and controls verification and e-discovery. Originally developed for the US Intelligence Community, NetWitness has evolved to provide enterprises around the world with breakthrough methods of network content analysis and host-based risk discovery and prioritization. NetWitness customers include Defense, National Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agencies, Top US and European Banks, Critical Infrastructure, and Global 1000 organizations. NetWitness has offices in the U.S. and the U.K. and partners throughout North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
To download the freeware version of NetWitness Investigator, visit http://download.netwitness.com . For more information about securing your entire organization with NetWitness NextGen, contact: sales@netwitness.com . Twitter handle: NetWitness .
Media Contact:
Steve Ward | (703) 994-9349 | pr@netwitness.com
Botnet revelation shows darker underbelly of malware
http://www.cio.com.au/article/336814/botnet_revelation_shows_darker_underbelly_malware?fp=39&fpid=25592
NetWitness first discovered the Kneber botnet in January during a routine deployment of the NetWitness advanced monitoring solutions. Deeper investigation revealed an extensive compromise of commercial and government systems that included 68,000 corporate login credentials, access to email systems, online banking sites, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other social networking credentials, 2,000 SSL certificate files, and dossier-level data sets on individuals including complete dumps of entire identities from victim machines.
Discussing the importance of the Kneber botnet, Amit Yoran, CEO of NetWitness and former Director of the National Cyber Security Division, said, "While Operation Aurora shed light on advanced threats from sponsored adversaries, the number of compromised companies and organizations pales in comparison to this single botnet. These large-scale compromises of enterprise networks have reached epidemic levels. Cyber criminal elements, like the Kneber crew quietly and diligently target and compromise thousands of government and commercial organizations across the globe. Conventional malware protection and signature based intrusion detection systems are by definition inadequate for addressing Kneber or most other advanced threats. Organizations which focus on compliance as the objective of their information security programs and have not kept pace with the rapid advances of the threat environment will not see this Trojan until the damage already has occurred. Systems compromised by this botnet provide the attackers not only user credentials and confidential information, but remote access inside the compromised networks."
"Many security analysts tend to classify ZeuS solely as a Trojan that steals banking information," stated Alex Cox, the Principal Analyst at NetWitness responsible for uncovering the Kneber-bot, "but that viewpoint is naive. When we began to detect the correlation among both the methodology used by the Kneber crew to attack victim machines and the wide variety of data sets harvested, it became clear that security teams must rethink their entire perspective on advanced threats such as ZeuS and consider more diverse mission objectives."
Over half the machines infected with Kneber also were infected with Waledac, a peer to peer botnet. The coexistence of ZeuS and Waledac suggests the goals of resilience and survivability and potential deeper cross-crew collaboration in the criminal underground.
"NetWitness enables the discovery of malicious code like Kneber - before things get critical and valuable data is lost," said Cox. "It is 100% certain that many organizations have no idea they are victimized by these types of problems because they're just not tooled to see them on their networks. The Kneber botnet is just one category of advanced threat that organizations have been facing the past few years that they are still largely ignorant or blind to today."
To download a copy of the NetWitness Kneber whitepaper, visit http://www.netwitness.com.
About NetWitness
NetWitness® Corporation is the world leader in real-time network forensics and automated threat intelligence solutions, helping government and commercial organizations detect, prioritize and remediate complex IT risks. NetWitness solutions concurrently solve a wide variety of information security problems including: advanced persistent threat management; sensitive data discovery and advanced data leakage detection; malware activity discovery; insider threat management; policy and controls verification and e-discovery. Originally developed for the US Intelligence Community, NetWitness has evolved to provide enterprises around the world with breakthrough methods of network content analysis and host-based risk discovery and prioritization. NetWitness customers include Defense, National Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agencies, Top US and European Banks, Critical Infrastructure, and Global 1000 organizations. NetWitness has offices in the U.S. and the U.K. and partners throughout North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
To download the freeware version of NetWitness Investigator, visit http://download.netwitness.com . For more information about securing your entire organization with NetWitness NextGen, contact: sales@netwitness.com . Twitter handle: NetWitness .
Media Contact:
Steve Ward | (703) 994-9349 | pr@netwitness.com
Botnet revelation shows darker underbelly of malware
http://www.cio.com.au/article/336814/botnet_revelation_shows_darker_underbelly_malware?fp=39&fpid=25592
Kneber was built using a well-established toolkit for aggregating botnets called ZeuS that has been around for years
Information gathered about a newly discovered botnet called Kneber indicates that multiple infections by different malware on the same host could work together as a sophisticated mechanism to give all the malware a better survival rate.
The sheer size of the Kneber botnet -- 74,000 compromised computers in 2,400 different companies -- attracted most of the attention when Kneber was revealed Thursday. But how it interacts with other malware networks suggests a symbiotic relationship that ultimately makes each botnet more resistant to being dismantled, says Alex Cox, the senior consultant in the research department at NetWitness who discovered Kneber.
Kneber was built using a well-established toolkit for aggregating botnets called ZeuS that has been around for years. Kneber is an example of just one botnet built with the toolkit, but because Cox captured 75GB of log data from the command-and-control server, he was able to examine detailed characteristics of the computers ZeuS took over.
What he found is that more than half the 74,000 compromised computers -- bots -- within Kneber were also found infected with other malware that uses a different command-and-control structure. If one of the criminal networks were disabled, the other could be used to build it up again,
"At the very least, two separate botnet families with different [command-and-control] infrastructures can provide fault tolerance and recoverability in the event that one [command-and-control] mechanism is taken down by security efforts," he says in his written analysis of the Kneber botnet.
In this case, more than half the machines that made up the botnet were infected with both ZeuS, which steals user data, and Waledac, a spamming malware that uses peer-to-peer mechanisms to spread more infections, he says. He can't conclude for sure that they're working together in this case, but the presence of both introduces an interesting possibility: If the ZeuS command-and-control infrastructure is cut down, the owner of the ZeuS botnet could go to the person running the Waledac botnet and pay for it to push a ZeuS upgrade that brings the ZeuS bots back online reporting to a new server, he says.
Alternatively, a single group could run both the ZeuS and Waledac botnets and push the upgrade itself. "From a disaster-recovery perspective, it makes sense," Cox says.
The Kneber server log contained individuals' passwords to sites including Facebook and Yahoo as well as a slew of financial sites including CitiBank, Wells Fargo, PayPal, Citizens Bank and HSBC Bank, according to Cox's report on Kneber.
Cox discovered Kneber Jan. 26 while working at a NetWitness customer site. He found a machine infected with ZeuS that was downloading other malware executables. He traced the traffic back to a ZeuS command-and-control server in Germany, where he was able to grab a month's worth of the server's log data. He won't say he accomplished these actions.
The botnet got its name from hilarykneber@yahoo.com, the registrant listed for the original domain used to pull together various components of the botnet. That same registrant has been associated with seeking other malware including PDF and Flash exploits as well as Trojan installs.
The same registrant is also listed on multiple Web sites seeking money mules -- people who accept illegal transfers of money into their bank accounts and forward them to other bank accounts in an effort to make the funds unrecoverable by the actual owners.
Kneber has been active since March 25, 2009, and most of the sites associated with its activities are in China, according to their underlying IP addresses, NetWitness says. About 17% of these sites are in the United States.
Cox also links Kneber to a phishing attack against U.S. government agencies that sends e-mails apparently from the National Security Agency that urges recipients to click on links that download the malware.
He gives significance to the fact that one of the things Kneber harvests is social networking usernames and passwords. These can be used to get into social networking accounts where they can post links to infected sites. Social network friends are more likely to trust these links because they seem to be posted by people they trust.
Social network accounts can also be mined for personal data that can be useful in further compromising individuals' financial accounts. For example, if social networking accounts yield mothers' maiden names, they might be used to reset passwords of bank accounts, giving attackers a way to get in and transfer money out.
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