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‘Friendly’ Cheese worm reveals many compromised boxes

And it's a tiny step from being highly destructive, too

The so-called 'cheese worm' has attracted a great deal of attention in the past 24 hours for its benign payload, which seeks to mend Linux boxes infected with at least one version of the li0n worm (which exploits a BIND vulnerability). However, it also demonstrates that there's a large number of already-compromised machines connected to the Net; and furthermore, a tiny modification to its code could render it immensely destructive.

The worm scans for machines with a secure root shell listening on TCP port 10008, as set up by a variant of the li0n worm. If the shell exists, cheese will install in the directory /tmp/.cheese and execute a script thus:

/tmp/.cheese/go:
#!/bin/sh
nohup ./cheese $1 1>/dev/null 2>&1 &

Cheese reads the file inetd.conf and rewrites it, deleting any line that contains the string /bin/sh. It then restarts inetd, with all /bin/sh processes killed indiscriminately.

"Until the 'cheese' process is somehow killed, it repeats a cycle of scanning semi-random /16 (e.g., class B) network blocks for hosts listening on TCP port 10008 using the 'psm' program," a detailed incident report by the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (CERT/CC) at Carnegie Mellon University explains.

The first octet of the address may be from 193 to 218; and the second may be from 1 to 254, Cert/CC says.

What's most interesting here is that cheese may be the first worm which automates the exploitation not of an existing vulnerability, as most do, but of an existing compromise.

"This is perhaps the first successful example of this type of exploit," CERT/CC artifact analysis team leader Kevin Houle told The Register.

Houle believes that the example here, while relatively harmless in itself, is alarming.

"We've seen an increase in reconnaissance (scanning) related to port 10008," he observes -- an increase which strongly implies activity by the cheese worm.

That, in turn, implies that there is quite a large number of machines already compromised, whose owners remain blithely ignorant of the fact. Call it proof-of-concept that the Net is teeming with already-rooted boxes.

He also emphasizes that it would be child's play to modify cheese for extremely destructive activity. Developing destructive exploits for existing compromises is not a trend Houle would like to see carried forward -- and we'll just second that ourselves. ®

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