Re: Unknown accepted traffic to my site

[Mitchell Krog Photography <mitchellkrog@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Spork for the detailed reply you got from Berkeley, I got a similar one, though not quite as detailed. I think the problem with Apache is that it is simply an index.html sending a 200 “OK” and not actually replying to say yes I am infected with whatever it is they are looking for. At the time when I first noticed this I looked into various ways of getting Apache to send a 400 or 403 but it involved messy rewrite rules which I just hate.

Seeing that I am now seeing this same string in various different formats coming in daily now from IP’s all over the globe I would say whatever infected servers out there who have been already been implanted with this malicious software are now perhaps being called into action, possibly a big DDOS attack planned or something else of a more sinister nature. Seeing that Berkeley are working with and reporting this to law enforcement makes me believe there is something quite sinister behind all of this. 

Anyways, certainly a very interesting one to keep an eye on. I am now also seeing similarly formatted strings now coming in over the past few days as per the example below which now also seem to be targetting SQL servers. Luckily none of mine are open to the public and only run as localhost but I am a sure a lot of people which port 3306 exposed are in for something being planned. 

This example below came in as a User-Agent string this morning in my logs, so not only are they sending crazy formatted strings via normal http / https requests but also now forging user agent string with similar stuff. 

"}__test|O:21:\x22JDatabaseDriverMysqli\x22:3:{s:2:\x22fc\x22;O:17:\x22JSimplepieFactory\x22:0:{}s:21:\x22\x5C0\x5C0\x5C0disconnectHandlers\x22;a:1:{i:0;a:2:{i:0;O:9:\x22SimplePie\x22:5:{s:8:\x22sanitize\x22;O:20:\x22JDatabaseDriverMysql\x22:0:{}s:8:\x22feed_url\x22;s:46:\x22eval($_REQUEST[1]);JFactory::getConfig();exit;\x22;s:19:\x22cache_name_function\x22;s:6:\x22assert\x22;s:5:\x22cache\x22;b:1;s:11:\x22cache_class\x22;O:20:\x22JDatabaseDriverMysql\x22:0:{}}i:1;s:4:\x22init\x22;}}s:13:\x22\x5C0\x5C0\x5C0connection\x22;b:1;}\xFD\xFD\xFD\xFD “

I must say every morning there is always something interesting to be found in one’s logs, sadly a great deal of people running servers out there don’t seem to monitor their logs as frequently as they should if at all.

Kind Regards

Mitchell

https://mitchellkrog.com

From: Spork Schivago <sporkschivago@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply: users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 07 October 2016 at 8:10:58 AM
To: users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:  Re: [users@httpd] Unknown accepted traffic to my site

Oh!   Tawasol, I forgot.   If you're not already doing so, you should have your server scanned for vulnerabilities.  There's free websites out there that can do this, like https://scanmyserver.com/

I believe nmap can also help you scan your server, although I don't think it was really designed for vulnerability scanning.   There's free for personal use programs, like Nessus.   The free version of Nessus only works on the local area network though.   However, websites like https://scanmyserver.com use the paid version of Nessus.   So, you can have your server scanned with Nessus by using something like scanmyserver.com.

If there's any exploits installed, the vulnerability scanner(s) should detect them.   Just make sure to whitelist the IP address in LFD and CSF before proceeding and double check the logs to make sure that CSF / LFD doesn't block the scanning website.

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 1:53 AM, Spork Schivago <sporkschivago@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Tawasol,

You might want to look into more than just mod_security.  For example, there's modules out there for PHP, for instance, that will make PHP run as a certain user.   If someone manages to take advantage of some poorly written PHP code, for example, they would only have limited user access and only be able to access the files in the directory where the html files are being stored.

I have crontab entries setup to scan for rootkits and do a bunch of other things.

Another program you might want to look into is ClamAV.   It's freeware.

Mod_security I like the best though.   It really does catch a lot of bad stuff.  It can be a bit confusing setting it up though.   Best of luck.

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Tawasol Go <tawasolgo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I use CentOS 7.x also CSF/LFD installed.

Till now they did not get into the server.

I'll look into mod_security.

Thanks,

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 1:01 AM, Anthony Biacco <abiacco@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 3:42 PM, Spork Schivago <sporkschivago@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Are you sure they haven't successfully found away in?   There are some free programs that I use to help prevent this stuff.   ConfigServer Firewall / LFD is a good one.   Rkhunter and chkrootkit scan for rootkits.   The big one that helps the most, I feel, is Mod Security.   That's the one that monitors the traffic looking for known scanning software, exploits, etc and blocks it.   I run in a *nix environment and don't have a lot of experience with Windows servers though.   Not sure what you're running.   I'm always really paranoid and would definitely be worried about by system being compromised if I saw traffic like you're seeing though.   But again, I'm not really that intelligent when it comes to stuff like this.

Ken

I was going to suggest mod_security as well. I'm not running it, but it's on my TODO list. I have to determine the performance implications, if any.

-Tony

 

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 5:21 PM, Spork Schivago <sporkschivago@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks Tony!   Much appreciated.

Erik,

Did I ever try to run what on my server?   The string query that Berkeley sends looking for the malware to respond?   If so, no, I have never tried to send that carefully crafted packet to my Apache server.   From the previous user who had what appears to be the same issue as Mitchell though, I would imagine it'd probably just deliver my default web page (index.html).   That's my guess though.

If anyone cares, I can copy the other e-mails they sent to me that explain how it all works and why the full string isn't in the Apache logs (I think that has something to do with the way Apache responds to the string).

They're not actually trying to exploit the server, they're just trying to find servers that have been infected.   If the malware sees a special string, it responds with a special string.   At that point in time, the college contacts the local law enforcement for that area to inform them and hope that they contact the owner of the server to inform them that they're infected.   Not the best way I guess to inform people, but better than nothing I guess.

Here, in my city, I doubt the local law enforcement would ever contact me with anything computer related.   I contacted them before because of a crime that happened in my house but because the internet and a computer was involved, they said they couldn't help and my best bet would be trying to contact the FBI or some other government organization.   I doubt anyone at my police station really knows much about PCs.   There doesn't seem to be a cyber crimes division or anything like that.

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 4:08 PM, Anthony Biacco <abiacco@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 8:47 AM, Spork Schivago <sporkschivago@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There's away to do a reverse IP lookup on the IP address and see if there's a DNS entry for it.   That's how I was able to successfully figure out who the senders were (Berkeley) originally.   I used dig I believe.   I don't have access to my Linux box right now, otherwise I'd check to see if the IP addresses are actually from Berkeley.   There's always a chance that they're using more than one server / IP now to conduct the scanning.   I believe they were originally trying to scan the whole internet.

 

based on the IP of 169.229.3.91 given by Mitchell:

91.3.229.169.in-addr.arpa. 9787 IN      PTR     researchscan1.EECS.Berkeley.EDU.

University of California - Office of the President UCSD-NET-169-228 (NET-169-229-0-0-1) 169.229.0.0 - 169.233.255.255

University of California at Berkeley ISTDATA (NET-169-229-0-0-2) 169.229.0.0 - 169.229.255.255

-Tony

They had said it's a very specific type of malware that only affects IIS to their knowledge.   If you're not running a Windows server running IIS, you should be good to go.

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 8:27 AM, Rainer Canavan <rainer.canavan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 6:26 PM, Joe Muller <jmuller@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From the looks of it I would say it is targeting servers running SSL.  Are
> you serving up HTTP or HTTPS ?

I don't think that that is valid SSL, unless your httpd discards the
first few bytes.
There was a SANS handler diary entry just yesterday about this:

https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/SSL+Requests+to+nonSSL+HTTP+Servers/21551/

if I try `openssl s_client -connect localhost:14020`, I get the below
entry in my access.log,
which matches the description in the diary:

127.0.0.1 localhost:14020 - - [06/Oct/2016:14:24:53 +0200] -
"\x16\x03\x01\x01,\x01" 400 226 "-" "-"

this, however, is something completely different. I'd also guess it's some kind
of vulnerability scan:

> IP
> 0.0.0.0 - - [02/Oct/2016:11:29:08 +0300]
> "n\x1d\xb6\x18\x9ad\xec[\x1d\b\xe6k\xbb\xe5L" 200 48605
> 0.0.0.0 - - [02/Oct/2016:16:04:20 +0300]
> "\x95\xa3\xb1\xce\xc8\xeb:\x86\x87\xb4\x03g\xfa~\x9f{\x07\xda\xef6O\xa1~\x91[\xf2\x05E\xac\xad\x8d\x9d\xbe\xf5\xfc\xc5\"\xed\xa3u"
> 200 48605

Rainer

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@httpd.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx