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New Worm Attacking Linksys Routers

posted by robind on Friday February 14 2014, @01:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the entry-level dept.

AudioGuy writes:

"Researchers say they have uncovered an ongoing attack that infects home and small-office wireless routers from Linksys with self-replicating malware, most likely by exploiting a code-execution vulnerability in the device firmware.

The worm works by injecting vulnerable devices with a URL-encoded shell script that carries out the same seek-and-hijack behavior. The exploit may also change some routers' domain name system server to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4, which are IP addresses used by Google's DNS service. Compromised routers remain infected until they are rebooted. Once the devices are restarted, they appear to return to their normal state. People who are wondering if their device is infected should check for heavy outbound scanning on port 80 and 8080, and inbound connection attempts to miscellaneous ports below 1024.

This blog post at Sans contains more technical details including a way to test if you have a vulnerable device."

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by mechanicjay on Friday February 14 2014, @11:36AM

    by mechanicjay (7) <mechanicjayNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday February 14 2014, @11:36AM (#73) Homepage Journal
    Okay, I get it, but is "- inbound connection attempts to misc ports 1024." an indicator of anything? I get that's the delivery mechanism, but have you looked at your firewall logs lately? Everyone is constantly getting probed by something at this point.
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  • (Score: 1) by ragequit on Friday February 14 2014, @05:25PM

    by ragequit (44) on Friday February 14 2014, @05:25PM (#77) Journal
    On average I get my first scan about 5 min after getting a connection.
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  • (Score: 1) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 14 2014, @06:13PM

    by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Friday February 14 2014, @06:13PM (#87) Journal

    Okay, I get it, but is "- inbound connection attempts to misc ports 1024." an indicator of anything? I get that's the delivery mechanism, but have you looked at your firewall logs lately? Everyone is constantly getting probed by something at this point.

    Well, actually I haven't looked at firewall logs for anything internet-facing in a long time. But I assume those probes are mainly targeted at the well-known ports for common services. TFA says the propagation connections of this malware are on random (seems to imply uniformly-distributed) ports <1024, though "misc" certainly doesn't communicate that distinction. These patterns should be distinguishable after you collect enough data.

    But it really doesn't matter; TFS says this infection doesn't survive a reboot, so if I had a vulnerable model of router in a vulnerable configuration (i.e. remote admin enabled), my steps would be:

    1. Fix the configuration.
    2. Reboot the router.
    3. Shoot myself in the head, making the world a better place. (Seriously, I don't know any question to which "expose a consumer router's web administration page to the WAN interface" is the right answer)

    At no point did I actually need to check whether it was currently infected; rebooting it regardless of infection status is easier than checking the logs and trying to infer infection status, and then possibly rebooting anyway.