Websense ToorCon Presentation

Thanks to a comment from Shahid for pointing me to the WebSense Security Labs presentation The Web Vector: Exploiting Human and Browser Vulnerabilities (.pdf). I think the most interesting part of the briefing is the introduction of Web-based bot net command and control. Because organizations are locking down outbound IRC, bot net controllers are using HTTP as a replacement protocol. If anyone has any experience with this sort of traffic, I would be interested in hearing from you.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey Richard, there was a malware analysis challenge by honeynet.org not too long ago where the subject was a backdoor controlled via HTTP.

http://www.honeynet.org/scans/scan32/

BTW congrats on Extrusion Detection. I've had it pre-ordered for a while now and can't wait to start reading it! :)
3:56 PM
Richard Bejtlich said…
Thanks Adam!
8:50 PM
John Ward said…
I am actually suprised we havn't seen more of this sort of thing in the wild, especially with the increased availability and encapsulation of SOAP libraries. Although I have no direct experience with this, in theory it really wouldn't take much to have a central Apache server acting as a bot controller and have the client machines poll for commands using SOAP calls. Its even possible to use specially crafted session and cookie variables (yeah yeah, that whole cookie paranoia of the late 90's) to communicate, and have the server return commands with to the bot with specially crafted HTML tags or steganography images. To a network security analyst, this would look like benign HTTP requests returning HTML and very difficult to detect. This is of course assuming that something like this is not already out there.

By the way, the SoTM challenges are great sources of info, I love those things :)
10:34 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more