new attack tool combining SMB and WebDAV?

From: Matt Power (mhpowerat_private)
Date: Sun Mar 30 2003 - 14:49:41 PST

  • Next message: John S. Pitts: "RE: strange DNS behavior over the last 2 days"

    A possibly new attack tool is being used in the wild that sends
    traffic to a set of nearby IP addresses, using tcp ports 445 and 80.
    The observed traffic on port 80 (first noticed around 2200 GMT on 30
    March) consisted of:
    
      OPTIONS / HTTP/1.1
      translate: f
      User-Agent: Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600
      Host: a.b.c.d
      Content-Length: 0
      Connection: Keep-Alive
    
    where a.b.c.d is the destination IP address. The traffic on port 445
    looked like the usual attack traffic described at, for example,
    http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-08.html
    
    In many cases, packets on both port 445 and 80 were sent to the same
    destination IP address.
    
    By "set of nearby IP addresses", I mean that the attacking machine was
    apparently trying to send data to all machines within an IP address
    range (rather than, for example, send data to IP addresses selected at
    random). It wasn't immediately clear why some IP addresses were
    skipped. A possibility is that the attacker had access to earlier
    reconnaissance data about which IP addresses were in use.
    
    The third type of traffic from the attacking machine consisted of very
    large ICMP echo-request packets, all going to the same destination IP
    address. The ICMP packet contents consisted entirely of the lowercase
    letters 'a' through 'w' repeated many times, e.g.,
    
      abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw...
    
    Anyway, this may mean that some type of WebDAV data-gathering or
    exploit capability has been incorporated into a software package that
    also compromises machines via SMB. There wasn't direct evidence that
    the software package was associated with planned exploitation of the
    CA-2003-09 vulnerability via WebDAV, although it may have been. The
    ICMP traffic suggests that the software package may have a DoS
    capability that's separate from the SMB and WebDAV traffic.
    
    Matt Power
    BindView Corporation, RAZOR Team
    mhpowerat_private
    
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