Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!apple!bionet!agate!ucbvax!RAND.ORG!salzman From: salzman@RAND.ORG (Isaac) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: A look inside the Internet VIRUS Message-ID: <8811042304.AA18450@rand.org> Date: 4 Nov 88 23:04:43 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: salzman@rand.org Organization: The Internet Lines: 433 Hi again folks! I've had some mild success at poking inside the virus using Sun's trace command on a Sun 3/50 running SunOS4.0. YP had to be shutdown for this to be usefull and of course all routes were deleted so it couldn't propagate anywhere outside the machine. This machine had a relatively small /etc/hosts and /etc/passwd file so it did its thing pretty quickly. To really see what it's doing the best scenario would be to run it on a network with a very small number of other machines (and no gateways to other nets!) to give it a chance to actually connect to something. What I did get was interesting though it only tells only a partial story. Keeping up with it was tricky since it would fork occasionally and exit, so I'd have to start trace up and attach to that new process pretty quickly to see anything happen. In this run it didn't look for individual .rhosts files (though it looked at .forward files). My feeling is that it would look at .rhosts after it's cracked the password for that person. It's not clear from this where password cracking would happen either since a lot of that doesn't require system calls. We have a disassembly of the thing as well and it's got a few of its own routines to do password cracking (replacements for stuff allready resident in UNIX). So here are some excerpts from trace with some redunancy edited out and some comments embedded comments. Enjoy!! 13:20:35 gettimeofday (0xefffce0, 0) = 0 13:20:36 getpagesize () = 8192 13:20:36 brk (0x29298) = 0 13:20:36 brk (0x2b29c) = 0 13:20:36 setrlimit (4, 0xefffcf4) = 0 13:20:36 sigvec (13, 0xefffcac, 0xefffcd8) = 0 13:20:36 open ("x15053677,vax.o", 0, 06) = 3 13:20:36 fstat (3, 0xefffca4) = 0 13:20:36 brk (0x3729c) = 0 13:20:36 read (3, "".., 45734) = 45734 13:20:37 close (3) = 0 13:20:38 unlink ("x15053677,vax.o") = 0 13:20:38 open ("x15901447,sun3.o", 0, 06) = 3 13:20:38 fstat (3, 0xefffca4) = 0 13:20:38 brk (0x4329c) = 0 13:20:38 read (3, "".., 47165) = 47165 13:20:38 close (3) = 0 13:20:39 unlink ("x15901447,sun3.o") = 0 13:20:39 open ("x11091853,l1.c", 0, 06) = 3 13:20:39 fstat (3, 0xefffca4) = 0 13:20:39 read (3, "#include \n#include