full-disclosure - [Fwd: Re: Re: Automated SSH login attempts?]

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From: stefan.janecek at jku.at (Stefan Janecek)
Subject: [Fwd: Re: Re: Automated SSH login attempts?]

uuups - forgot to cc the list on this one. sorry.

-----Forwarded Message-----
From: Stefan Janecek <stefan.janecek@....at>
To: Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] Re: Automated SSH login attempts?
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 11:45:51 +0200

On Thu, 2004-07-29 at 21:35, Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 18:38:15 +0200, Stefan Janecek <stefan.janecek@....at>  said:
> >
> > This does not seem to be a stupid brute force attack, as there is only
> > one login attempt per user. Could it be that the tool tries to exploit
> > some vulnerability in the sshd, and just tries to look harmless by using
> > 'test' and 'guest' as usernames?
> 
> Highly doubtful.  It's easy enough to test though - just use the tool
> to poke another machine under your control, and use tcpdump or ethereal
> to capture all the traffic (don't forget '-s 1500' or similar for tcpdump
> to get the *whole* packet).  Then somebody familiar with the SSH
> protocol can go through it byte by byte and look for anything odd.
> 
> I don't expect we'll find anything, unless it's some very hard to trigger hole
> on some odd architecture. Remember - with all of these probes, we're only
> seeing a very few boxes actually get 0wned. More likely, script kiddies have
> re-discovered the concept that if there's 500 million boxes online, enough of
> them are administered by clueless people that they can snarf shells using a
> default userid/password pair.....
> 


This is exactly what I did. The tool tries to login as users 'test' and
'guest'. But I don't think it is about just snarfing passwords, because
those users did not exist on the compromised machine - yet they got in. 

My personal feeling is (given their poor success) that they are using
some old-fart ssh vulnerability. The compromised machine had an uptime
of 254 days if I remember correctly, and was hardly used during this
time, nor has it been updated. Still I would really like to know
*exactly* what they are doing, just to make sure...