Friday, July 11, 2014

"Gameover Zeus" is back - This time with "Fast Flux Hosting"

looks like it was aptly named ZEUS (Greek God) because, it refuses to die.



From the Article

The company found that the malware shares roughly 90 percent of its code base with Gameover Zeus.

This new Gameover variant is stripped of the P2P code, and relies instead on an approach known as fast-flux hosting. Fast-flux is a kind of round-robin technique that lets botnets hide phishing and malware delivery sites behind an ever-changing network of compromised systems acting as proxies, in a bid to make the botnet more resilient to takedowns.

Like the original Gameover, however, this variant also includes a “domain name generation algorithm” or DGA, which is a failsafe mechanism that can be invoked if the botnet’s normal communications system fails. The DGA creates a constantly-changing list of domain names each week (gibberish domains that are essentially long jumbles of letters).

In the event that systems infected with the malware can’t reach the fast-flux servers for new updates, the code instructs the botted systems to seek out active domains from the list specified in the DGA. All the botmasters need to do in this case to regain control over his crime machine is register just one of those domains and place the update instructions there.

This discovery indicates that the criminals responsible for Gameover’s distribution do not intend to give up on this botnet even after suffering one of the most expansive botnet takeovers and takedowns in history,” 



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