[pehrens at ligo.caltech.edu: Re: Nmap *NOT* affected by libpcap trojan]

[Scott Howell]

Folks, I am subscribed to the list about Nmap. This info might e very 
interesting to folks. I have not had a chance to verify all the info nor 
have I seen anything from Bug Track, but that could be more a problem 
with not geting mail from my ISP. In any case, if anyone does know more, 
please share.

tnx


----- Forwarded message from Philip Ehrens <pehrens at ligo.caltech.edu> -----

Mailing-List: contact nmap-hackers-help at insecure.org; run by ezmlm
From: Philip Ehrens <pehrens at ligo.caltech.edu>
To: Fyodor <fyodor at insecure.org>
Cc: nmap-hackers at insecure.org
Subject: Re: Nmap *NOT* affected by libpcap trojan
Mail-Followup-To: Philip Ehrens <pehrens at lrxms.net>,
	Fyodor <fyodor at insecure.org>, nmap-hackers at insecure.org

I would like to point out that the type of trojan described below
is becoming increasingly common.  ftp.sendmail.org was compromised
recently and a similar trojan was placed in the sendmail source
tarball.

I know of at least 12 common packages that have had their source
tarballs compromised within the last 3 months on servers that were
considered secure.  The folks doign this have gone as far as to
hijack DNS and root machines on specific subnets in order to place
this type of trojan.

These trojans are activated during te build process of the source
tarball in most cases, usually the configure script contains some
variation of code that establishes a connection to a remote machine.

I believe that the folks doing this are actually trying to catch
certain specific machines or subnets, and are not doing this to
set up DDOS or just to own large numbers of boxes.  When I activated
one of these trojans while building a package all that happened was
that my /etc/passwd file was shipped off.  The machine listening on
the other end never did anything except stay connected for a while.

I expect to see more and more of this at an accellerating rate
from now on...  if you are letting root make remote connections
you are asking for trouble!

Sorry for using your list for this Fyodor, I won't do it again.

Phil

Fyodor wrote:
> I just wanted to send out a quick note that the version of libpcap
> shipped with Nmap does NOT contain the trojan described at:
> 
> http://hlug.fscker.com/
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/13/1255243&mode=nested&tid=172&threshold=3
> 
> Cheers,
> -F

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