The Sality botnet

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The Sality botnet
Botnet	Maazben, Storm, Pandex, Rustock
Malware	Sality
Botnet/malware group
Exploit kits
Services
Feature
Distribution vector
Target
Origin
Campaign
Operation/Working group
Vulnerability
CCProtocol	P2P
Date	2010 / 14 May 2010
Editor/Conference	Symantec
Link	http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/sality-botnet (Archive copy)
Author	Nicolas Falliere
Type

Abstract

“ As discussed in a previous blog entry, Sality-infected computers become part of a peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet. This botnet is used by peers to exchange lists of URLs pointing to malicious software, which Sality will decrypt, download and install.

Though the peer-to-peer protocol used by Sality is custom, we can reverse-engineer the malware binary to determine the P2P packet format, as well as protocol rules and features. Traffic analysis can be used to facilitate or guide a white box approach. Eventually, writing a working P2P client and/or server can be used to validate the analysis.

I decided to create a rogue P2P client that would join the Sality botnet and crawl it, in order to estimate its size.

Let’s do a quick reminder of what the P2P protocol offers:

A peer can ask another peer for its list of URLs. A peer can send its list of URLs to another peer. A peer can ask another peer to send the coordinates (IP, port) of a third-party peer.

Bibtex

 @misc{2010BFR896,
   editor = {Symantec},
   author = {Nicolas Falliere},
   title = {The Sality botnet},
   date = {14},
   month = May,
   year = {2010},
   howpublished = {\url{http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/sality-botnet}},
 }