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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master
NRT-0347 New Breed of Malware:
Web 2.0 technologies may be laying the groundwork for a new generation of hacker tools, a noted security researcher said. The security researcher speaking at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) US 2007 conference, held on eBay's campus warned Google Mashups, RSS feeds, search, all of these can be misused by hackers to distribute malware, attack web surfers and communicate with botnets. Tools like the downloadable MPack hacker toolkit have made it easier for the bad guys to deploy malicious code, but some of these emerging technologies promise to take hacking to a whole new level, he said. "Now people can use and abuse Web 2.0 technologies to construct something much larger," he said. "When you look at it from a hacker perspective, you'll see there are a whole lot of opportunities," he said. For example, it took the researcher just one day to build a web- based attack infrastructure using Google Mashup Editor, Google's invite-only web application development service. And even if Google decided to shut down this type of attack service, its open and distributed design makes it very easy to set up a new account and alunch an identical service. This kind of Web 2.0 malware is in its infancy, but it's starting to be used. Criminals are also starting to use RSS-to-email conversion services to have an untraceable way of controlling their networks of hacked computers. Until recently botnets would always look for commands on a pre-allocated IRC channel, but now, distributed RSS- based command-and-control networks are coming into favor. This makes it much harder for law enforcement to take down the computers that are actually sending the instructions to the botnet machines. Another tactic: Attackers could encode the date and domain name of the computer looking for instructions on random web pages that would also contain attack instructions for the botnet. These instructions could then be dug up by the botnet using Google search. Researchers believe that criminals are only beginning to experiment with Web 2.0 hacking techniques like these, but that if they do catch on, it could become a nightmare for the Web 2.0 world.
(IDG News Service 14NOV07)
Last Modified: Wednesday, 23-Jan-2008 18:51:26 EST
