Government Computer News
On the trail of servers gone bad
‘Honeyclient’ Web crawlers try to find source of botnets
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Image: GCN Photo by Rick Steele
“That’s what makes the botnet challenge so vexing. It is very difficult to trace back to the botnet herder.” — Greg Garcia, DHS
The honeyclient apps built by Mitre are virtual machines, trolling the Web to detect sites that reveal signs of malware when evaluated against the baseline performance of safe sites, said computer scientist Kathy Wang, lead infosec engineer/scientist at Mitre.
Honeyclients “provide the capability to potentially detect client-side exploits” that can be used in malware attacks, Wang said during a presentation at the recent GFirst conference here. GFirst is an acronym for Government Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams. Her previous published work on the topic has described Army honeyclient research, among other aspects of the field.
The exploits on the malicious sites often allow the server operator to enslave the PCs of unsuspecting visitors on a bot herd of zombie computers. Malicious coders routinely sell newly discovered exploits — of the Microsoft Vista operating system, for example — at prices as high as $250,000 for the most valuable vulnerabilities, cybersecurity experts said.
Botnet herders, in turn, rent out the capability of their hijacked computers at rates ranging from a few cents a month for a home computer to several dollars monthly for a PC inside a corporate network, the cybersecurity specialists said. Criminals and terrorists are willing to pay those rates to broadcast malicious spam and other attacks, they added.
Mitre now operates six autonomous honeyclients, which navigate the Web in a spider-like fashion as they hunt for potentially malicious servers, Wang said. The honeyclients report their findings about suspect sites and servers back to Mitre for analysis, she said.
Several federal agencies are in discussions with Wang and her Mitre colleagues about how to use honeyclients to proactively identify and counteract malicious servers, she said.
“The attackers are starting to include honeyclient avoidance technology on malicious servers,” she told the audience of cybersecurity professionals. Wang said the operators of malicious sites have started to use features in their servers that can distinguish between a visit by a human and a visit by a honeyclient virtual machine.
As a result, Wang said, “we are building a human-like honeyclient prototype.” The prototype will mimic human behavior partly by showing the delays and bandwidth footprint that human visitors show when they check a site.
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