An interesting happening this week, some ISP’s have been jacking the DNS entries for certain IRC networks to crack down on zombie/bot infections.

Is it ethical? Should they be doing this to their users?

I first got wind of this from a post on Full Disclosure mailing list from an IRC network administrator.

Internet service provider Cox Communications is reportedly diverting attempts to reach certain online chat channels and redirecting them to a server that attempts to remove spyware from the computer. By doing so the company seems to be attempting to cleanse computers of malware that hijacks the computers resources to send spam and participate in online service attacks as part of a large network of compromised computers known as a botnet.

Specifically, Cox’s DNS server is responding to a domain name request for an Internet Relay Chat server. Instead of responding with the correct IP address for the server, Cox sends the IP address of its own IRC server (70.168.70.4). That server then sends commands to the computer that attempt to remove malware.

They seem to run some kind of script when the user connects to try and ‘clean’ the machine from infection….even if it’s not infected.

IRC is still used heavily, I don’t really use it much anymore apart from Freenode. The Darknet channel used to be on DALnet back in the day.

Freenode is pretty happening for open source projects though.

Though clever, the tactic is being heavily debated by networking experts on the NANOG mailing list, some of whom question the effectiveness of the technique and who question whether blocking access to the channels for all users (by breaking the DNS protocol) in order to stop some malware is the appropriate solution. Cox does not seem to be blocking all IRC channels, but anyone trying to reach those channels using Cox’s DNS servers will be unable to reach them.

IRC channels are heavily used by programmers, non-traditional communities and black-hat hackers, among others. The malware-infected zombie computers Cox is attempting to clean can also be controlled remotely by having them connect to an IRC channel where they get instructions from their controller.

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[Source Darknet ]
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The Internet will mark an infamous anniversary on Sunday, when the Morris worm turns 20. Considered the first major attack on the ‘Net, the Morris worm served as a wake-up call to the Internet engineering community about the risk of software bugs, and it set the stage for network security to become a valid area of research and development.

“It was a really big deal,” says Eric Allman, a computer programmer who in 1981 authored sendmail, open source Internet e-mail software, while he was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. Today, Allman serves as chief science officer at Sendmail, a company that sells commercial-grade versions of the software.

“The biggest implication of the Morris worm was that the Internet was very small … and it was considered a friendly place, a clubhouse,” Allman says. “This [attack] made it clear that there were some people in that clubhouse who didn’t have the best interests of the world in mind … This made it clear we had to think about security.”

It was when the Internet first got into the mainstream media and was known to the general public, albeit it was for the wrong reason. But still I doubt anyone expected back then how dependant we would eventually become on the Internet.

Now if something like this went on and 10% of the Internet was down and seriously effected by a worm which caused denial of service….the whole World would be in turmoil.

It’d be chaos seriously!

The Morris worm was written by Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris, who was later convicted of computer fraud for the incident. Today, Morris is a respected associate professor of computer science at MIT.

Launched around 6 p.m. on Nov. 2, 1988, the Morris worm disabled approximately 10% of all Internet-connected systems, which were estimated at more than 60,000 machines.

The Morris worm was a self-replicating program that exploited known weaknesses in common utilities including sendmail, which is e-mail routing software, and Finger, a tool that showed which users were logged on to the network.

The Morris worm was able to break into Sun 3 systems and Digital VAX computers running BSD Unix. The fast-spreading worm kept copying itself and infecting computers multiple times, causing many systems to fail.

It’s an interesting story to read if you are familiar with it and probably even more interesting if you’re not, so do check out the Wiki pages on the history of the situation.

There have been very few worms that have caused such widespread infection and failures. Blaster was quite memory and on the virus front I remember CIH was terrible.
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