Re(2): Help with an odd log file...

From: Ken Eichman (keichmanat_private)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2003 - 12:58:52 PDT

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    > From: "James C. Slora Jr." <Jim.Sloraat_private>
    > Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 21:29:27 -0400
    > Please forgive my rambling below - I'm all hyped up because I've been
    > looking at something similar and it looks like something big is happening
    > under our noses.
    
    I agree. The few feelers I put out about this have fallen on deaf ears so
    I've been sitting on this for a couple of weeks, watching it slowly grow
    to its present volume of one of these random SYNs almost every second
    against our /16.
    
    > My working hypothesis is that the primary probe source is completely spoofed
    > and is some sort of homing signal for a complex trojan. The oddball probes
    > are probably not spoofed and are possibly the agents of the actual abusers.
    > The "agents" have all been dialup or cable modem systems (probably owned),
    > except the primary prober that is spoofing the address of a very large
    > semi-government agency.
    
    We're seeing a around 100-200 "agents" (as you call them) here. I also
    concluded that the one-to-one source-to-destination probers are spoofed
    (i.e, your "primary prober"),and I've been looking at the one-to-many probers
    ("agents") as the interesting traffic. Presently each of these ~100
    probers are our /16 network anywhere from once/minute (the most active
    prober) to once every 1-3 hours. As you found, these addresses are
    dominated by cable/DSL/broadband providers. Another common thread is that
    many (but not all) of them have open netbios port(s), primarily 135/tcp.
    
    > I also can't help but wonder if this traffic might be related to the
    > stateless Code Red middle packets being logged widely and some Code Red
    > infections that people are reporting inside hardened systems. A Q-like
    > trojan could possibly have been triggered by the packets to start sending
    > Code Red packets even though IIS had been hardened. Maybe someone who has
    > had this happen could review their logs and compare sequence and IDs on
    > packets from the source they believe compromised them with a stateless 2nd
    > packet only of Code Red. If those sequence and IDs correlate with other
    > anomolous packets, that might establish a link.
    
    FWIW so far I haven't found any IIS servers running in the "agent" group.
    
    Ken Eichman                 Senior Scientist
    Chemical Abstracts Service  IT Information Security
    2540 Olentangy River Road   614-447-3600 ext. 3230
    Columbus, OH 43210          keichmanat_private
    
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