full-disclosure - ISS Security Brief: "MS Blast" MSRPC DCOM Worm Propagation (fwd)

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From: somatose at cox.net (Chris Garrett)
Subject: ISS Security Brief: "MS Blast" MSRPC DCOM Worm Propagation (fwd)

I had a friend infected with the worm earlier today, at about 17:00EST. He was
running Windows XP Home edition. He called me because his computer had been
rebooting "spontaneously," and whenever he would go to google to search for a
strange binary he saw [msblast.exe], he either found nothing or was mysterious
redirected to some strange website. At least, I believe that was his
description. I hadn't seen any reports of MSBlast on FD before this point, but I
was almost certain it was a worm of some sort using the DCOM RPC exploit. I had
him check the registry, remove the keys, and delete .*msblast.*. I also had him
disable DCOM, since I doubted he was using anything that utilized it, then
directed him to the MS03-26 patch. This was all based on a guess that it he was
infected by something DCOM related [makes sense given the massive publicity and
severity of this vulnerability]. I wasn't certain if any other files were
corrupted at the time, but those simple measures seemed to do the job. Imagine
my surprise when 10 minutes later, I receive and FD email reporting the release
of a worm identified by an msblast binary.

My friend also reported to me that /somehow/ his Norton Auto-Protect had been
disabled. Now, I don't know if that was the worm [as I've not seen any analyses
thusfar to suggest that the worm does that], or if it was something he had
disabled, accidentally, at some point.

In short, XP is affected, as well. And I would imagine his computer kept
rebooting because other systems within the class B range he was on were
constantly probing his system and trying the 2K offset, and not because of the
worm that had already infected his system [which was my original, incorrect,
impression, before the analyses put out by ISC, XFocus, and Norton].

Christopher Garrett III
Inixoma, Incorporated