RE: Mitigating some of the effects of the Code Red worm

From: Tony Langdon (tlangdonat_private)
Date: Thu Jul 19 2001 - 18:01:04 PDT

  • Next message: Ryan Russell: "Re: Full analysis of the .ida "Code Red" worm."

    > I'm not sure of the ethical or legal aspects of this, but I 
    > don't see why
    > we can't take advantage of three facts:
    > 
    > 1) There is something of an ongoing log of affected machines 
    > that can be
    > obtained from boxes earlier in the IP list.
    > 2) Machines which have been compromised can STILL be compromised.
    > 3) The worm has a "lysine deficiency" which can be remotely 
    > introduced.
    
    I'd say legally, you're on very shaky ground.  Not something I'd attempt,
    for that reason alone.  What if a bug in your "friendly worm" trashed
    someone's server or DOS'd them at a critical moment?  I think the lawyers
    would be onto that one.
    
    A "safer" approach would be to have something that could do a whois lookup
    of the attacking netblocks and prepare a scripted email for you to review
    before aending.
    
    Besides patching the IIS server when the original advisory came out, I have
    also taken the steps of heavily filtering outbound traffic from the IIS box
    (stuff that should never be generated in normal use), and logging that, so I
    can be aware of anything suspicious, severely limit the abilitiy of any worm
    to infect other systems and minimise the risk of being involved in a DDOS
    attack (except perhaps against myself, but that's my problem! :) ).
    



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