Re: 'Code Red' does not seem to be scanning for IIS

[George William Herbert <gherbert () retro com>]

Ryan wrote:
> Mike Brockman wrote:
> > > From what i read about the 'Code Red'-worm, it was supposed to be scanning
> > for IIS-servers. It obviously is'nt, i believe it tries to infect
> > everything they find on port 80, or something as simple as that.
>
> Run nc -l -p 80 > worm, and you'll get a copy.  It's not scanning
> in any sense, it just tries a connect, and sends the string.

An anonymous chat room contact yesterday told me they'd had
success linking default.ida to their kernel; the worm always
seemed to abort its attack after something like 32k of stuff
was shoved down the pipe from thier Linux/Apache server.
They hypothesized it was causing a buffer overrun in the
worm code.

After hearing that, I dropped a copy of Shakespeare's 
"Much Ado About Nothing" into htdocs/default.ida on
my system and snooped the net a while.  I got one more
connect attempt from the worm and it seemed to have dropped
its connection after something like 30k of data flowed back,
but I was unable to tell what happened at the far end.
I only was able to watch one event happen.

I've reviewed the eEye analysis and concluded I don't know
enough assembly to tell whether it appears to work that way,
and I don't have an IIS system to use as a testbed.  Can someone
who's got a better handle on how the virus' internals are
behaving take a look and confirm or deny that this is an
effective prophylactic measure?


-george william herbert
gherbert () retro com