I've seen use of HTTP by bots on the rise a bit and have seen two
implementations in some detail. Much of it is fairly trivial to detect,
like IRC protocol running on port 80. I've seen a couple examples I've
seen were harder to spot.
One was a request for a page that looked like most any normal auth form
for webmail services. It was hosted on a compromised box belonging to a
major website so it the traffic we had looked mostly harmless. I showed
it to some engineers at an IDS vendor and the consensus was that it was
pretty tough to write a signature against; the traffic it produced was
pretty small and what we had looked pretty normal. We ended up detecting
it by the user agent which was a bit different owing to the use of some
HTTP library for Delphi used by the bot developer. We used a simple
snort rule (only useful in this specific case, but the approach was
somewhat interesting):
alert tcp $HOME_NET any -> $EXTERNAL_NET 80 (msg:"Trojan control get???
command"; content:"User-Agent: UtilMind HTTPGet|0D 0A|"; )
Another clever example was a bot which issued a GET for a normal looking
page and parsed for base64 encoded commands contained in HTML comments.
There were three commands: sleep, download & execute file, and reverse
shell. This isn't hard to spot once you know the pattern but there's
bound to be better stuff out there.
Looking for misshapen traffic symmetry, like HTTP sessions with large
outbound data streams, is one technique I've heard people have some
success with. Regular expressions can spot data outbound if you're
looking for structured data like account numbers. Some products also
look for high outbound HTTP connection rates that are too fast to be
human or HTTP sessions that cross a time threshold. Simple data volume
thresholds are too easily triggered by streaming apps, in my experience,
unless you consider the direction and traffic shape as in the misshapen
symmetry example above.
Craig Chamberlain
craig@q1labs.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Jose Nazario [mailto:jose@monkey.org]
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006 1:11 PM
To: mikeiscool
Cc: Ron Gula; focus-ids@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: detecting network crowd surges
On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, mikeiscool wrote:
I wonder, though, is this how real botnets are controlled?
based on our measurements and observations, IRC is the
dominant method for botnet control at this time. but HTTP
methods, similar to the ones you described, are coming on in
popularity. poll frequencies range from 5 seconds to 1 hour or more.
________
jose nazario, ph.d. jose@monkey.org
http://monkey.org/~jose/ http://monkey.org/~jose/secnews.html
http://www.wormblog.com/
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