Russian Gang Hijacking PCs in Vast SchemeAugust 6, 2008Russian Gang Hijacking PCs in Vast Scheme By JOHN MARKOFFA criminal gang is using software tools normally reserved for computer network administrators to infect thousands of PCs in corporate and government networks with programs that steal passwords and other information, a security researcher has found.The new form of attack indicates that little progress has been made in defusing the threat of botnets, networks of infected computers that criminals use to send spam, steal passwords and do other forms of damage, according to computer security investigators. Several security experts say that although attacks against network administrators are not new, the systematic use of administrative software to spread malicious software has not been widely seen until now.The gang was identified publicly in May by Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, a computer security firm in Atlanta. Mr. Stewart, who has determined that the gang is based in Russia, was able to locate a central program controlling as many as 100,000 infected computers across the Internet. The program was running at a commercial Internet hosting computer center in Wisconsin. Mr. Stewart alerted a federal law enforcement agency that he declined to identify, and he said that it was investigating the matter. Although the original command program was shut down, the gang immediately reconstituted the system, he said, moving the control program to another computer in the Ukraine, beyond the reach of law enforcement in the United States.The system infects PCs with a program known as Coreflood that records keystrokes and steals other information. The network of infected computers collected as much as 500 gigabytes of data in a little more than a year and sent it back to the Wisconsin computer center, Mr. Stewart said. One of the unique aspects of the malicious software is that it captures screen information in addition to passwords, according to Mark Seiden, a veteran computer security engineer. That makes it possible for gang members to see information like bank balances without having to log in to stolen accounts.Mr. Stewart’s discoveries are evidence that while the botnet problem is now well understood, botnets are still a widespread threat.“The rate of infection is still high, but concern among corporations is low,” said Rick Wesson, a botnet investigator at Support Intelligence, a security consulting firm in San Francisco. “Many corporations seem to think it’s O.K. to be infected several times a month.” Mr. Stewart and other computer security investigators have previously described the activities of the gang that uses the Coreflood program. But Mr. Stewart plans to offer newdetails about the gang, which has operated with impunity for several years, at the Black Hat Briefings computer security conference that begins Thursday in Las Vegas.As part of his investigation, Mr. Stewart charted the rate of computer infections at a state police agency and a large hotel chain. Both were victims of an outbreak that began after the gang obtained the password and login information of their network administrators. In both cases hundreds or thousands of computers were infected within minutes or hours.Mr. Stewart would not name the organizations because of the continuing law enforcementinvestigation.In these examples as well as a range of others, the gang infected a machine belonging to an administrator and then used Microsoft administrative tools to infect all the computers for which that person had responsibility, Mr. Stewart said.The new attack is a byproduct of the way modern computer networks are administered, where authority is centralized and software updates for thousands of machines are automated.“The great thing about this system is that from one computer it is possible to push out updates to all machines in a corporate network at once,” Mr. Stewart said. “This is a useful tool that Microsoft has provided. However, the bad guys said, ‘We’ll just use it to roll out our Trojan to every machine in the network.’ ”A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the attacks.Mr. Stewart said that the gang behind the Coreflood program was responsible for 378,000infections over 16 months. In each case the infected computer would capture and transmitpersonal information to a centralized database that kept track of the “spies” in the network.In his Black Hat presentation, Mr. Stewart plans to say that he believes the Russian gang was behind a successful theft of money from the bank account of a Miami businessman, Joe Lopez. In April 2004, someone made an unauthorized wire transfer of $90,348 from Mr. Lopez’s account with Bank of America to Parex Bank in Riga, Latvia. Of that amount, $20,000 was successfully withdrawn by a person using a false identity. The Coreflood program was found on Mr. Lopez’s computer.After discovering the control program in Wisconsin, Mr. Stewart tracked the online activities of some gang members in a Russian city that he declined to identify because of the investigation. He said translations of some entries on the blogging site LiveJournal had led him to believe that one member of the gang had died, but that others remained active. He said that he had provided investigators with a wealth of information about the group from members’ online discussions and other material he had collected.“If the Russians are sincerely interested in tracking these guys down, I think it’s possible,” he
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