Malware in Recent Korean DDoS Attacks Destroys Systems

Via McAfee Labs Blog -

There has been quite a bit of news recently about distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks against a number of South Korean websites. About 40 sites– including the Presidential, National Intelligence Service, Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, and the National Assembly–were targeted over the weekend, beginning around March 4 at 10 a.m. Korean time. These assaults are similar to those launched in 2009 against sites in South Korea and the United States and although there is no direct evidence connecting them so far, they do bear some similarities.

DDoS attacks have occurred with more and more frequency, but one of the things that makes this attack stand out is its use of destructive payloads. Our analysis of the code used in the attack shows that when a specific timezone is noted by the malware it destroys the infected computer’s master boot record. If you want to destroy all the data on a computer and potentially render it unusable, that is how you would do it.

The malware in the Korean attacks employs an unusual command and control (C&C) structure. Instead of receiving commands directly from its C&C servers, the malware contacts two layers of servers. The first layer of C&C servers is encoded in a configuration file that can be updated at will by the botnet owner. These C&C servers simply provide a list of servers in the second layer, which will provide additional instructions. Looking at the disbursement of the first-layer C&Cs gives us valuable insight into the malware’s global footprint. Disbursement across this many countries increases resilience to takedowns.

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The two layers make it harder to analyze the malware because an analyst must understand many components and cannot simply follow the code flow within one malware binary. However, forensics are easier because in postmortem we can identify which task files have been created on an infected computer.

The malware in its current incarnation was deployed with two major payloads:

• DDoS against chosen servers
• Self-destruction of the infected computer

Although the DDoS payload has already been reported elsewhere, the self-destruction we discussed earlier in this post is the more pressing issue.

When being installed on a new computer, the malware records the current time stamp in the file noise03.dat, which contains the amount of days this computer is given to live. When this time is exceeded, the malware will:

• Overwrite the first sectors of all physical drives with zeroes
• Enumerate all files on hard disk drives and then overwrite files with specific extensions with zeroes

The service checks for task files that can increase the time this computer is allowed to live, so the botmaster can keep the botnet alive as long as needed. However, the number of days is limited to 10. Thus any infected computer will be rendered unbootable and data will be destroyed at most 10 days after infection! To protect against tampering, the malware will also destroy all data when the system time is set before the infection date.

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It is funny sometimes, how short of a memory we have in the infosec community....

PCs Used in Korean DDoS Attacks May Self Destruct (July 2009)
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/07/pcs_used_in_korean_ddos_attack.html

There are signs that the concerted cyber attacks targeting U.S. and Korean government and commercial Web sites this past week are beginning to wane. Yet, even if the assaults were to be completely blocked tomorrow, the attackers could still have one last, inglorious weapon in their arsenal: New evidence suggests that the malicious code responsible for spreading this attack includes instructions to overwrite the infected PC's hard drive.

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Update, July 10, 10:00 a.m. ET: South Korean anti-virus firm Hauri has published an exhaustive analysis of this malicious software, available at this link here (PDF). It states that when July 10, AM 00:00 comes, the malicious code deletes files with certain extensions, that the "operating system not found" error appears at the next boot, and that the system cannot then be started normally.