Malware herders are speeding up, the first wave is already here for MS06-40.

It’s basically a variant of some old malware suited to the new vulnerability. Same old story then, same packer, technique, new exploit.

Same as the days of autorooters.

It’s basically the Mocbot trojan that was used in the Zotob worm attack in August 2005.

The first wave of malicious attacks against the MS06-040 vulnerability is underway, using malware that hijacks unpatched Windows machines for use in IRC-controlled botnets.

The attacks, which started late Aug. 12, use a variant of a backdoor Trojan that installs itself on a system, modifies security settings, connects to a remote IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and starts listening for commands from a remote hacker, according to early warnings from anti-virus vendors.

I hope the AV first are on top of things, people are patching their machines in a timely fashion (especially in corporate environments – come on people, get SUS!) and awareness is going up.

“Amazingly, this new variant of Mocbot still uses the same IRC server hostnames as a command-and-control mechanism after all these months. This may be partially due to the low-profile it has held, but also may be due to the fact that the hostnames and IP addresses associated with the command-and-control servers are almost all located in China,” LURHQ said in an advisory.

Historically, Chinese ISPs and government entities have been less than cooperative in taking action against malware hosted and controlled from within their networks, the company said.

On Aug. 13, a second variant of the Trojan was detected, confirming fears that botnet herders are already playing cat-and-mouse with anti-virus vendors.

Quite surprising in a way, but also not really as it’s China and they are notoriously un co-operative.

Source: Eweek