I notified him and he immediately went to TrendMicro House Call to clean it up. He said it found “a few things,” but he didn’t note what they were, nor did he try to isolate them so I could attempt to decompile and inspect them. Ah well, such is the world, and he had work he needed to be able to finish with his machine.

The odd thing was, once his machine was cleaned and no longer in contact I began to get a flood of TCP SYN packets and UDP packets to the server on port 23130. The size of the UDP packets (between 75 and 196 bytes) leads me to believe they were some sort of botnet commands, while the TCP SYN packets were bots trying to reconnect to their lost buddy. This definitely did not have the marks of a DDoS of any sort, as once the bot on the Windows machine was stopped (and I once again had outbound bandwidth) the packets were hitting the server in a fairly steady fashion, but not in any kind of flooding behavior. In other words, each host was trying no more than 5 times to connect via TCP and no host sent 2 identical UDP packets in a row. The reason they were hitting the server is that the packets were being sent to a specific IP address, and trying to create a new connection with that IP means you are trying to connect to the server. Without the established connections in NAT on the router, all these packets were going to the server. Unfortunately the server in question is not beefy enough to run tcpdump, even for a few minutes, and trying to alter my network enough to get my laptop in where it could sniff the packets was out of the question.

While I didn’t have tcpdumps or even extensive firewall logs I did have the abbreviated logging that takes place in messages. (I also had dmesg logs to look at, but I never realized until last night that dmesg logs are not timestamped. I wonder if that is a configuration error on my part. Right now I am too exhausted to try to figure that one out.) So, I had the log entries in /var/log/messages and there is plenty good information there – and here is what I saw, from the hours of Sep 18, 19:16:59 to Sep 19 03:06:49. (Note that the packets are still coming in, but now at a rate of somewhere around 2 attempts per hour.)

There were a total of 178,335 TCP SYN packets to port 23130, along with 33,894 UDP packets to the same port. These requests came from 1,994 unique IP addresses. Below are some interesting statistics.

Edit: Mostly I am curious about the botnet in question. If anyone comes across a bot that is communicating on port 23130 please let me know what you find out about it.

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At this point the attacks seem to have been aimed at UltraDNS, which primarily handles traffic for .org sites.

While there is as yet no mention of who is suspected or what their motives may be, there was a similar attack last year on UltraDNS.

The AP’s report is here.

Technorati Tags: DNS, UltraDNS, security, analysis

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