Conficker: The other not so famous Variant A

There are lot more discussions are going on for Conficker variant C (ConfickerC) due to 1st April. Why 1st april?. The 1st april is the day ConfickerC should call home for updates. The domain name generator  algorithm  used by ConfickerC is making blocking or detecting live ConfickerC update servers is becoming harder when it will search for about 50K domains name. :D. Please refer to SRI excellent  write-up for more information about ConfickerC here.  MyCERT advisory about ConfickerC is here.

I can’t say much about the current situation but based on my observation on dns traffic we have, we only observed low volume of traffics contacting ConfickerC domains name hosted in .my domain. Maybe because it wasn’t the time yet.(my timeframe of observation was on 27-29 March 09).

Compare to ConfickerA (variant A), we observed more traffics are looking for the domain name: trafficconverter.biz. Trafficconverter.biz is the server that will be contacted by ConfickerA. Take a look at ConfickerA file sample and we’ll see the domain name.It’s very disturbing to notice that variant A is still out there screaming for their C&C server while alot more discussion have been switching to ConfickerC.

During the timframe ( 27-29 March 09), it is about 1167+ queries to DNS looking for the trafficconverter.biz. it’s still considered a big infection based on DNS traffics query only. Luckily the trafficconverter.biz is no longer running. But, the infected machines is still need to be clean-up.

We already released our advisory for ConfickerA and also mentioned about tools that can be used to remove the ConfickerA. The advisory is here. If you haven’t patch your MS08-67, please do so.

Log Files: Dealing with Inconsistent Field Delimeter

Salam,

Log files are big. Processing  it  would be cumbersome especially if the field separator are not so unique.

Take a look at contain of file example.log below :

At first sight, anybody would agree to use ‘ as field separator. But hey, the third field contain that same character.

If we insist to choose (‘) as our separator, the field number will not be consistent through out the file.
Line 1 would have 7 field, line 2 have 5 field etc.

If the task is to print ip number and the file requested, how should we do that?

Luckily gawk have special keyword, NF, means number of field.
To print just first and second field using gawk:

# -F use to tell what the field separator character

From the example.log, the file requested is on the second last column. On line 1, its in field 6, meanwhile on second line, its on field 4.

In this case we can use NF keyword for gawk. NF would contain the number of field in each line.  To get the second last column, we can use (NF-1) as below:

Hope that helps.

Securing PHP : Disabling Dangerous PHP Functions

PHP is a very popular language nowadays. But at the same time, it’s also one of the main sources for user accounts and servers getting compromised. Every PHP developer and hoster should understand the primary attack vectors being used by attackers against PHP applications. They also should be able to classify PHP functions that allowed to be used and disable cirtain functions that can be categorized as dangerous.

Based on my experience and a big help from Google, I can categorize the following functions as dangerous :-

Now you need to verify your php.ini location

And look for Configuration File (php.ini) Path

phpinfo

Now, edit the configuration file with root permission

Look for the disable_functions = “” and modify it to

Make sure you save before exit.

Now restart Apache for the changes to take effect.

The default PHP configuration is intended for development purposes. Therefore, it is always advisable to reconfigure PHP before going into production phase. Some security settings are also recommended during the development phase to prevent programmers from producing vulnerable code, and make them stick to secure techniques.

Until next episode..

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