As you have probably read, a method for remotely detecting systems infected with the Conficker worm was discovered by Felix Leder and Tillmann Werner. They have been working with Dan Kaminisky, amongst others, to come up with a tool to detect the worm and give IT organizations the ability to protect themselves. This is excellent news. The bad news is how unprepared most applications are to handle threats like this. Earlier this morning, the guys at The Honeynet Project were kind enough to forward Rich and myself a copy of their Know Your Enemy: Containing Conficker paper. This is a very thorough analysis of how the worm operates. I want keep my comments on this short, and simply recommendation strongly that you read the paper. If you are in software development, you need to read this paper.

Their analysis of Conficker illustrates that the people who wrote it are far ahead of your typical application development team in their understanding of application security. Developers need to understand the approach that attackers are taking, understand the dedication to their craft these guys are exhibiting, and increase their own knowledge and dedication if they are going to have a chance of producing code that can counter these types of threats.

Is Conficker a well-written piece of code? Is it architected well? No idea. But it is clear that each iteration has advanced their three core functions (find & infect, maintain, & defend) and had this flexibility in mind from the begining. Look at how Conficker uses identification techniques to protect itself in avoid downloading the wrong/malicious patches to their worm. And check out the examination of incoming requests to help protect their now infected system from other viruses. This should serve as an example of how to write internal monitoring code to detect exploit attempts (see section 4), either in lieu of a full blown patch, or as self-defending code at critical points, or both. And it is done in a manner that gives them a generic tool that, when updated, will be an effective anti-malware tool. Neat, huh? The authors have a pretty good understanding of randomness and used multiple sources, not only to get better randomness, but to avoid an attack on any one- smart. These are really good application security practices that very few software authors actually put into practice. Heck, most web applications trust everything that comes in, and it looks like the authors of Conficker understand that you must trust nothing!

Once again, if you are a software developer or IT practitioner, read the paper. The research that Felix and Tillmann have put into this is impressive. They have proof points for everything they believe to be true about the worm’s behavior, and have stuck with the facts. This is really time consuming, difficult work. Excellent job, guys!

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