The Origin of Hanford Man

I finally got time to write this up, hopefully you enjoy it.

The Origin of Hanford Man

Mental Drippings

This is got to be one of the funniest things I have ever read. Not for the faint of heart... ;)

The Mosby name has finally made the web!! Look for updates soon....

http://www.mosby.org

For those of you that have not heard, a network scanning virus came out this weekend that exploits MS04-011. There are several variants of this virus now (A-D so far) and almost all of them are of medium to high risk and are spreading heavily in the wild. Rumors are saying that this was written by the writer(s) of Netsky.

Cleaning tools can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;841720 (A and B only)
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sasser.removal.tool.html (A-C)
http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/ (A-C, plus a bunch of other viruses)

Here is what we have so far:

Information from Microsoft (covers A and B):
http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/sasser.asp

Sasser.A

Summary (from McAfee’s website)

Virus Characteristics:

This self-executing worm spreads by exploiting a Microsoft Windows vulnerability [MS04-011 vulnerability (CAN-2003-0533)]
The worm spreads with the file name: avserve.exe . Unlike many recent worms, this virus does not spread via email. No user intervention is required to become infected or propagate the virus further. The worm works by instructing vulnerable systems to download and execute the viral code.
Symptoms

The virus copies itself to the Windows directory as avserve.exe and creates a registry run key to load itself at startup
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsCurrentVersion\Run "avserve.exe" = C:\WINDOWS\avserve.exe
As the worm scans random ip addresses it listens on successive TCP ports starting at 1068. It also acts as an FTP server on TCP port 5554, and creates a remote shell on TCP port 9996.
A file named win.log is created on the root of the C: drive. This file contains the IP address of the localhost.
Copies of the worm are created in the Windows System directory as #_up.exe.
Examples
• c:\WINDOWS\system32\11583_up.exe
• c:\WINDOWS\system32\16913_up.exe
• c:\WINDOWS\system32\29739_up.exe
A side-effect of the worm is for LSASS.EXE to crash, by default such system will reboot after the crash occurs. The following Window may be displayed:


Method Of Infection

This worm spreads by exploiting a recent Microsoft vulnerability, spreading from machine to machine with no user intervention required.
This worm scans random IP addresses for exploitable systems. When one is found, the worm exploits the vulnerable system, by overflowing a buffer in LSASS.EXE. It creates a remote shell on TCP port 9996. Next it creates an FTP script named cmd.ftp on the remote host and executes it. This FTP script instructs the target victim to download and execute the worm (with the filename #_up.exe as aforementioned) from the infected host. The infected host accepts this FTP traffic on TCP port 5554.
The worm spawns multiple threads, some of which scan the local class A subnet, others the class B subnet, and others completely random subnets. The destination port is TCP 445

Thorough analysis of the Sasser worm by eEye Digital Security
http://www.eeye.com/html/Research/Advisories/AD20040501.html

Symantec-Level 3
http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sasser.worm.html


McAfee-Medium Risk
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_125007.htm


Trend Micro-Medium Risk
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM_SASSER.A


Sasser.B

Symantec-Level 4
http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sasser.b.worm.html


McAfee-Medium Risk
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_125008.htm

Trend Micro-High Risk
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM_SASSER.B


Sasser.C
W32.Sasser.C.Worm is a minor variant of W32.Sasser.B.Worm. It attempts to exploit the LSASS vulnerability described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-011, and spreads by scanning randomly-chosen IP addresses for vulnerable systems. This particular variant spawns 1024 threads for the infection routine, where as previous variant W32.Sasser.B.Worm uses 128 threads.

Symantec-Level 2
http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sasser.c.worm.html

McAfee-Low Risk
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_125009.htm

Trend Micro-Low Risk
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM_SASSER.C


Sasser.D (This one is pretty new)

Summary from McAfee’s website:
AVERT has received a new variant of W32/Sasser.worm . Analysis is currently ongoing - description will be updated once complete.
The previous variants of this self-executing worm spread by exploiting a Microsoft Windows vulnerability [MS04-011 vulnerability (CAN-2003-0533)].
This variant of the worm is intended to spread with the following file name:
• SKYNETAVE.EXE
Unlike many recent worms, this virus does not spread via email. No user intervention is required to become infected or propagate the virus further. The worm works by instructing vulnerable systems to download and execute the viral code.

McAfee-Low Risk
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_125012.htm

Trend Micro-Low Risk
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM_SASSER.D