Creation and effects
According to court papers, the original Blaster was created after security researchers from the Chinese group reverse engineered the original Microsoft patch that allowed for execution of the attack. The worm spreads by exploiting a buffer overflow discovered by the Polish security research group Last Stage of Delirium in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026 (CVE-2003-0352) and later in MS03-039. This allowed the worm to spread without users opening attachments simply by spamming itself to large numbers of random IP addresses. Four versions have been detected in the wild. These are the most well-known exploits of the original flaw in RPC, but there were in fact another 12 different vulnerabilities that did not see as much media attention. The worm was programmed to start a SYN flood against port 80 of windowsupdate.com if the system date is after August 15 and before December 31 and after the 15th day of other months, thereby creating a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against the site. The damage to Microsoft was minimal as the site targeted was windowsupdate.com, rather than windowsupdate.microsoft.com, to which the former was redirected. Microsoft temporarily shut down the targeted site to minimize potential effects from the worm. The worm's executable, MSBlast.exe, contains two messages. The first reads:I just want to say LOVE YOU SAN!!This message gave the worm the alternative name of Lovesan. The second reads:
billy gates why do you make this possible ? Stop making moneyThis is a message to
and fix your software!!
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\ windows auto update=msblast.exe
Timeline
*May 28, 2003: Microsoft releases a patch that would protect users from an exploit in WebDAV that Welchia used. (Welchia used the same exploit as MSBlast but had an additional method of propagation that was fixed in this patch. This method was only used after 200,000 RPC DCOM attacks - the form that MSBlast used.) *July 5, 2003: Timestamp for the patch that Microsoft releases on the 16th. *July 16, 2003: Microsoft releases a patch that would protect users from the yet unknown MSBlast. At the same time they also released a bulletin describing the exploit. *Around July 16, 2003: White hat hackers create proof-of-concept code verifying that the unpatched systems are vulnerable. The code was not released. *July 17, 2003: CERT/CC releases a warning and suggests blocking port 135. *July 21, 2003: CERT/CC suggests also blocking ports 139 and 445. *July 25, 2003: releases information on how to exploit the RPC bug that Microsoft released the July 16 patch to fix. *August 1, 2003: The U.S. issues an alert to be on the lookout for malware exploiting the RPC bug. *Sometime prior to August 11, 2003: Other viruses using the RPC exploit exist. *August 11, 2003: Original version of the worm appears on the Internet. *August 11, 2003: Symantec Antivirus releases a rapid release protection update. *August 11, 2003, evening: Antivirus and security firms issued alerts to run Windows Update. *August 12, 2003: The number of infected systems is reported at 30,000. *August 13, 2003: Two new worms appear and begin to spread. (Sophos, a variant of MSBlast and W32/RpcSpybot-A, a totally new worm that used the same exploit) *August 15, 2003: The number of infected systems is reported at 423,000. *August 16, 2003: DDoS attack against windowsupdate.com starts. (Largely unsuccessful because that URL is merely a redirect to the real site, windowsupdate.microsoft.com.) *August 18, 2003: Microsoft issues an alert regarding MSBlast and its variants. *August 18, 2003: The related helpful worm, Welchia, appears on the internet. *August 19, 2003: Symantec upgrades their risk assessment of Welchia to "high" (category 4). *August 25, 2003: McAfee lowers their risk assessment to "Medium". *August 27, 2003: A potential DDoS attack against HP is discovered in one variant of the worm. *January 1, 2004: Welchia deletes itself. *January 13, 2004: Microsoft releases a stand-alone tool to remove the MSBlast worm and its variants. *February 15, 2004: A variant of the related worm Welchia is discovered on the internet. *February 26, 2004: Symantec lowers their risk assessment of the Welchia worm to "Low" (category 2). *March 12, 2004: McAfee lowers their risk assessment to "Low". *April 21, 2004: A "B" variant is discovered. *January 28, 2005: The creator of the B variant of MSBlaster is sentenced to 18 months in prison.Side effects
Although the worm can only spread on systems runningSee also
* Conficker * Timeline of computer viruses and worms * List of convicted computer criminals *References
{{Hacking in the 2000s, collapsed Windows malware Exploit-based worms Hacking in the 2000s