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Comment by bobcostas55 | Hacker News Reader

How the hell do these little kids get control of big botnets?

The reply to your question is already on point. There is a sickening amount of open systems on the net. I know zee used tends of thousands of routers as only some of his ddos tools. I also know of dudes who wrote custom scripts specifically for zee's ddosing, would scan for incoming connections matching whatever signature identified at the time, automatically connect to the router using whatever exploit to get in, change the root pass and restart it.

Zee got his net taken away from him numerous times hitting the wrong people.

But yes in a nutshell, the digital world is mostly unprotected open and unlocked houses, with little pockets of protected castles here and there, and some locked houses too.

I wonder what the payoff is for running a script to secure the CentOS box you just rooted versus leaving it open to additional attacks. On one hand, you have potential loss of your work due to disruption of services leading to someone noticing and re-imaging the box. On the other hand, I don't particularly like sharing with randoms.

It also makes me wonder if optimized command and control networks have been developed. Most of the code I see floating around public drops goes to very little effort to conceal data exfil, if it even makes an effort to identify data to exfil at all. This seems like a real waste given that some large percentage of machines you steal are likely worth more than just their cpu time and bandwidth. Obviously the more code you run, the higher your chances of detection, but it seems like a huge creative space. How do I find interesting files without tripping all the alarms? How do I efficiently take over someone else's LSM hooks?

They're likely just band-aid patching the exact hole they use to get in, rather than securing the whole system.

By incoming connections, do you mean web visitors who fell victim to CSRF/XSS exploits in their router management web panels? Or was he hijacking routers another way?

I don't know if zee gained any skill over time, but I believe he simply used public exploits.

So for example remote command injection vulns:

http://en.1337day.com/exploit/description/20598

http://en.1337day.com/exploit/description/20602

http://en.1337day.com/exploit/description/20671

Then it is just a matter of figuring out where these routers are, and then writing a few scripts to exploit and command them in mass. I don't think CSRF/XSS would net him the vast numbers he'd need to make a significant ddos.

And to more specifically answer your question, by "incoming connections", I mean like monitoring the ddos via netstat on a box zee was actively attacking.

Well, problem is those vulns require either the attacker to share or control the victim's LAN in some way, or the router's management panel to be exposed to the Internet (which is usually not the default for the vast majority of consumer routers).

For cases where they're remotely exposed, just about anyone can scan the Internet and try to exploit these routers. I'm sure he was doing that, but I'm sure hundreds or thousands of other people were as well.

When combined with something like a CSRF, you can use those exploits against a victim even if their router is locked down (only listening on LAN, strong admin password). All they need to do is visit a site you control, without something like NoScript. If the admin password is not guessable, then they'd need to have an active login session. That can be circumvented if the router has an auth bypass vuln, which has been found in at least a few models.

Also, I believe a lot of routers can be used for DDoSing without exploiting or compromising them at all if they're exposing SSDP (UPnP). SSDP reflection, possibly combined with NTP reflection, is likely how Lizard Squad launched their DDoS attacks.

P.S. I know you and have talked to you (and Zee and some others), briefly, on some IRC networks long ago.

If that was a case, people running SSDP (and other UDP service) honeypots would no doubt have noticed the massive increase in traffic.

Of course. I was just speculating based on the comment about using routers to DDoS; I don't know if an uptick was actually observed during the outage. I know SSDP has been the hip new thing for the past few months though.

If that's not the case, mind giving any hints?

Majority of our bandwidth does not come from these so called "reflection attacks". But is in fact "real" bandwidth.

We are using actual 0days to compromise the (about 100k-150k) servers we have.

I'm actually rather excited for the eventual technical analysis of our net by someone with actual technical competence. It might end up causing quite a bit of noise.

Oh, that's pretty interesting, and a refreshing change from what you normally see in this space.

I seem to recall you guys (I think it was you guys, may be mixing up with another group; I also know you were supposedly kicked out of HTP at some point, which adds to my confusion) using one of the Rails YAML handling 0-days to acquire bots a while ago. I think someone was logging the IRC channel where they were being joined to.

Would it be fair to say the other bots are mostly a result of other web app vulns, or are you guys actually finding 0-days in native applications as well?

Do you actually have a full vulnerability research team, or is it just like 1-2 guys finding vulns? HTP's stuff like Coldfusion and MoinMoin was definitely pretty impressive.

There was a few rails YAML bots on an IRC for maybe an hour before another bot was loaded on them. (But that was like over an year ago)

A large chunk of the boxes we control do not have any sort of web apps running on them.

Pretty impressive then.

I understand you may not want to reveal much for opsec purposes, but just one question: the Lizard Squad guys seem like very run of the mill script kiddies. Why would you help them, if you are? Kind of seems like a skill and motive mismatch. Forgive my ignorance if the situation is more complicated than that; I'm just going off of what Krebs wrote.

Ones public actions do not necessarily equal ones skills. The motives behind LS are more complex than some journos believe, something that should be obvious by the darkode connection alone.

Krebs seems to be pretty lost, especially considering that he thinks we've been attacking his site for past 40 days or so. That's just not true (and anyway, if Prolexic couldn't keep PSN up why would they be able to keep his site up?), only thing linking us to attacks against him was a joke in the topic of our fake recruitment channel telling people to take his site down for an hour or so.

Anyway, as for my motives (besides money, of course)? You don't get access to this many boxes without stumbling on at least something interesting.

The darkode thing was certainly interesting. It just doesn't seem to match up with what you see coming out of the @LizardMafia twitter. Though perhaps that's intentional deception.

I'm guessing part of the plan is to continue gaining infamy and notoriety to sell services, starting with the stresser. I also wouldn't be too surprised if perhaps the stresser is a sting op or honeytrap on your part, with the money as just an added bonus.

One thing you should understand, we currently have basically two types of clients. First is of course the kids who go to lizardstresser.su and buy the $20 plan so they can attack people they play video games with.

Now, on the other hand we have our corporate clients. These corporate clients usually contact us via email or over forums and either make us a fixed offer or request a quote for a given target and time-frame. Now, these types of clients are usually willing to pay tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to disrupt their competition for a couple of days.

The second type of customer is obviously our main source of income, and what better way to find those clients than worldwide media publicity?

It'd be funny if this ended up being a sting op, wouldn't it?

Care to share any information about these 0 days: affected systems, programs, or other hints?

Lots of it is the sort of equipment you wouldn't notice. Not exactly embedded stuff though.

The bar is pretty low. When there are tens of millions of unpatched machines floating around on the internet, and hundreds of weaponized exploits already written by other people, all it takes is patience and lack of good judgement.

If they're taking over Paypal accounts or stealing credit card numbers, it can be as simple as buying a lot of capacity at the various VPN provider. We know from the attack on Tor that they had many thousands of google compute instances, and the same may be true on the many, many other providers.

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